I've spent whole summers at Neauphle alone except for drink. People used to come at weekends. But during the week I was alone in that huge house, and that was how alcohol took on its full significance. It lends resonance to loneliness, and ends up making you prefer it to everything else.

[…] Alcohol, even those in the gutter, tend to be intellectuals. The proletariat, a class far more intellectual now than the bourgeoisie, has a propensity for for alcohol, as can be seen all over the world. […] Just look at the history of ideas. Alcohol makes people talk. It's spirituality carried to the point where logic becomes lunacy; it's reason going mad trying to understand why this kind of society, this Reign of Injustice, exists. And it always ends in despair.

[…] What they lack is a god. The void you discover one day in your teens – nothing can ever undo that discovery. But alcohol was invented to help us bear the void in the universe – the motion of planets, their imperturbable wheeling through space, their silent indifference to the place of our pain.

A man who drinks is interplanetary. He moves through interstellar space. It's from there he looks down. Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.

No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting, can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation. Alcohol's job is to replace creation.

Duras, Practicalities