Book

The Trip to Echo Spring

: On Writers and Drinking

A New York Times Notable Book of 2014 A Time Magazine Notable Book of 2014 Olivia Laing's widely acclaimed account of how writers in the grip of alcoholism created some of the greatest works of Ame

(10 total)

Characters

Olivia Laing (6)John Cheever (2)Ray Carver (2)

“We are all of us like that boy sometimes. I mean we all carry something inside us that can be rejected; that can look silver in the light. You can deny it, or try and throw it in the garbage by all means. You can despise it so much you drink yourself halfway to death. At the end of the day, though,…”

— Olivia Laing, amazon.com

Tagged: Writing, Writers, Drinking, Drugs, Recovery

“I made a wasteland out of everything I touched.”

— Ray Carver, amazon.com

Tagged: Writing, Writers, Drinking, Drugs

“I'm afraid, mortally afraid... that if the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story, that's how closely, God Forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and mental well-being.”

— Ray Carver, amazon.com

Tagged: Writing, Writers, Editing, Editors, Gordon Lish

“In her loving and sometimes shocking memoir, 'What It Used To Be Like', Maryann Buck Carver remembered an argument the couple had a few days after their wedding, in which her new husband announced that he regretted marrying and would always choose writing over her. Swallowing her own ambition, she d…”

— Olivia Laing, amazon.com

Tagged: Maryann Buck Carver, Ray Carver, Writers, Parenting, kids

“It had struck me a long time back that the dream of letting go into water is prevalent in the work of alcoholic writers. I'd been collecting them up, these little fantasies of cleanliness, purification, dissolution and death. Some were healthful: antidotes to a kind of felt dirtiness gathering elsew…”

— Olivia Laing, amazon.com

Tagged: Drinking, Alcohol, Writers, Water, Swimming

“I sense in some small part of myself how pleasurable it might be to let alcohol unhinge you, to take you down into an unreachable, sunken place, where sounds are very muted.”

— Olivia Laing, amazon.com

Tagged: Drinking, Alcohol, Writers, Quote of the Moment

“As he inflates his imagination, he inflates his capacity for anxiety, and inevitably becomes the victim of crushing phobias that can only be allayed by crushing doses of heroin or alcohol.”

— John Cheever, amazon.com

Tagged: Writers, Stories, Anxiety, Mental Health, Creatives

“We are told stories as children to help us bridge the abyss between waking and sleeping. We tell stories to our own children for the same purpose. When I find myself in danger -- caught on a stuck ski-lift in a blizzard -- I immediately start telling myself stories. I tell myself stories when I am i…”

— John Cheever, amazon.com

Tagged: Writers, Stories, Death, Psychology, Quote of the Moment

“It wasn't the death he'd hope for, either way.”

— Olivia Laing, amazon.com

Tagged: Writers, Drinking, Tennessee Williams, Death

“I wanted time to think, and what I wanted to think about was alcohol.”

— Olivia Laing, amazon.com

Tagged: Writers, Drinking