Life's Pleasures Quote by Patrick Marber

Self-control, in Patrick Marber's telling, isn’t a virtue so much as a structural weakness he refuses to test. The line lands because it flips the usual moralizing around drugs into something more unnervingly intimate: not "I’m better than that", but "I know exactly how I’m built". That blunt "one sniff" compresses temptation into a single sensory trigger, and the punchline - "I’d go all the way" - isn’t coy. It’s a portrait of appetite as an on/off switch, not a dimmer.

Marber, a writer associated with sharp social observation (and, in his plays, characters who talk around their vulnerabilities until they accidentally confess them), uses exaggeration as a kind of honesty. The hyperbole is doing double duty: it’s funny in the way a confession can be funny when it arrives too quickly, too baldly; it’s also a preemptive boundary-setting. He’s not debating moderation because he’s telling you moderation wouldn’t be available to him. That’s a different species of caution - less about virtue than risk assessment.

The subtext is about compulsion, not chemicals. "Drugs" stand in for any seductive escape hatch: sex, gambling, attention, the intoxicating feedback loop of approval. By framing abstinence as self-knowledge rather than righteousness, Marber dodges the sanctimony that often accompanies celebrity or artist talk about addiction. The line is a small, well-cut piece of self-mythology: I’m not immune; I’m avoiding the experiment because I already know the result.