Life's Pleasures Quote by John Shirley

There is a deliberate swagger to Shirley calling craft a kind of intoxication. He borrows the language of vice to describe discipline, and the friction between those two ideas is the point: writing isn’t framed as a delicate, well-lit “practice,” but as an altered state with consequences. The line reads like a correction to the cultural script that equates artistic output with chemical damage. Shirley doesn’t moralize about sobriety; he sidesteps it. He admits the appetite, the compulsion, the loss of ordinary self-control, then relocates it onto the page.

The specific intent is twofold. First, it legitimizes intensity. If writing can make you “drunk,” then the euphoria, the tunnel vision, the risk-taking with language are not accidents; they’re the engine. Second, it protects the writer’s identity. “I don’t drink or do drugs” is a preemptive strike against the romantic myth of the strung-out genius, especially potent in the post-punk/cyberpunk cultural neighborhood Shirley comes out of, where transgression is currency. He wants the voltage without the wreckage.

Subtextually, the quote argues that creative work is its own neurochemistry: adrenaline, dopamine, immersion, the headrush of discovering a sentence you didn’t know you had in you. “Inebriated” also hints at danger: when you’re “carried away,” you’re not fully steering. That’s the seduction Shirley is naming, and quietly warning about. The page can be a bottle, even when it’s “clean.”