Of vice and men

Garrison Keillor quit smoking, and then, drinking. What he misses most are the friends who kept indulging.

I CAME ALONG toward the tail end of a grand old tradition of manly self-destructiveness in American writing—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Neill, Cheever, Carver, Tennessee Williams. And then of course there was Dylan Thomas, the Welshman.

So when I determined at the age of 18 to become a writer, I accepted my obligation to smoke many packs of cigarettes a day and learn how to drink gin and whiskey in goodly amounts, and to shun exercise done for the sake of exercise. No running. Writers were not runners. It was too awkward to run and smoke at the same time. We sat, brooding, and lit up and refilled the glass.

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