I speak onstage to try to establish some method of communication. The songs are supposed to be a way of communicating. But speech and drinks and sometimes chocolates are also a way of communicating.

May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother, about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff, shrinks would say. I was eight, and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast.

Though all soft drinks are acidic, dark ones like Coke and Pepsi are the most acidic and it has been found that it takes 32 glasses of high PH alkaline water to neutralize a glass of cola. So acidic are some of these drinks that they can be and are often used to clean corrosion of car battery terminals, and can even be used to clean toilet bowls.

Almost every single commercial on television for shampoo, sports shoes, drinks, food, clothes, perfume, cars, etc., is a short fairy tale, for they are given magical qualities.

The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.

We got to the casino and ordered some drinks. We then walked around, drinking and losing. We had some drinks at the craps table and lost money there. We had some drinks at the slot machines and lost a little more over there. Our drinking and money lasted longer at the blackjack tables, but even there our drinks and winning streak dried up. The more we drank, the flirtier we became. Although I was hemorrhaging money like crazy, I was the luckiest guy in the casino.

"Swirling soft pinks, in silky drinks.

If you hold a candle close to you, its flame rises. And if you hold it away from you, its flame shrinks. The same way you hold a candle close to you, keep all your plans, aspirations, projects, and dreams close to you too. Do not share your plans or goals until you complete them, because as you hold your candle away from you, your goals will shrink in the eyes of others. Envy, jealousy, and resentment will put out your flame before it grows.

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other Inspirational.

We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.

"A few drinks and the world was hers-

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

Kate Chambers, amateur sleuth in "Ground Truth: A Pittsburgh Murder Mystery," believes that "One drink sharpens your wit, two drinks makes you a philosopher, three or more drinks just makes you stupid.

The powers of a man's mind are directly proportioned to the quantity of coffee he drinks.

"I am a man, and men do not drink pink drinks. Now, be gone, woman, and fetch me something brown." Jace said.

An alcoholic is someone you don't like, who drinks as much as you do.

Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff shrinks would say. I was eight and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast.

It is error only and not truth that shrinks from inquiry.