Life's Pleasures Quote by Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens meets mortality the way he met most opponents: by refusing the comfort of euphemism and denying everyone else the pleasure of pity. “Millions of people die every day” is not callousness so much as scale as solvent, dissolving the sentimental haze that normally gathers around illness. He insists on the banal arithmetic of death to puncture the special pleading that says a famous mind shouldn’t have to exit like the rest of us.

The phrase “Everyone’s got to go sometime” is pub-level plainness, a deliberate drop from the elevated language cancer narratives often demand. Then comes the signature twist: “I’ve came by this particular tumor honestly.” That “honestly” is doing heavy moral work. It’s half confession, half preemptive strike. By assigning himself responsibility, he seizes control of the story before the disease can be turned into a parable by admirers, enemies, or the wellness-industrial complex. He won’t be canonized as a blameless victim; he also won’t let the diagnosis be weaponized as cosmic punishment. It’s just cause and effect, with a shrug.

The parenthetical detail - “very heavily with occasional interruption” - is classic Hitch: comic precision that smuggles in self-portraiture. He admits addiction without the choreography of repentance. Context matters: this is late Hitchens, after the esophageal cancer diagnosis, when the famed polemicist aimed his skepticism at his own body. The subtext is a final assertion of intellectual sovereignty: even here, he will name the variables, own his choices, and keep the language unsentimental.