Johnson told the doctors that “he enjoyed nothing but whiskey, sunshine and sex.” Reedy found the moment “poignant,” he was to recall. “Without realizing what he was doing, he had outlined succinctly the tragedy of his life. The only way he could get away from himself was sensation: sun, booze, sex.

Rejoicing and celebrating with sinners was incomprehensibly scandalous (Luke 15:1). They [the Pharisees] could only assume that he [Jesus] had become a pleasure-seeker, “a drunkard and a glutton” (Luke 7:34).

[He] would know many nights on which he would succumb to women whom a combination of over-eagerness and alcohol would make him think desirable, only to clutch his head in the morning on discovering that he had got into bed with some vast relative of Oliver Hardy's or with some flighty Bela Lugosi look-alike.

He was not pious. He drank whiskey whenever he felt chilly, and kept a jug of it handy. He knew far more profanity than Scripture, and used and enjoyed it more. He had no belief in the infallible wisdom of the lower classes, but regarded them as inflammatory dolts, and tried to save the republic from them. He took no interest in the private morals of his neighbors.

He liked to be popular and in place of charm had to dispense alcohol…

I knew that Jack needed a lot of help, and what he really needed was somebody who could spend a prodigious amount of time with him, every night, see him, live with him, live with him the way someone in A.A. lives with a drunk. … I wasn't doing that. So when the crime occurred — because I'd just been hoping things would work out all right — when the crime occurred, I knew that I had a responsibility on that one.

He had no special hobbies, but he needed luxury in general of a kind, and especially the luxury of getting things in a hurry, his theory being that everything comes to the man who won't wait.

Jack so obviously demanded from a woman-a relationship between a man and a woman where a man would be the leader and a woman would be his wife. With Adlai Stevenson you could have another relationship-where you know, he'd be sort of be sweet and you could talk, but you wouldn't ever,.. I've always thought women who were scared of sex loved Adlai.

[...] I observed he [Samuel Johnson] poured a large quantity of it [wine] into a glass, and swallowed it greedily. Everything about his character and manners was forcible and violent; there never was any moderation; many a day did he fast, many a year did he refrain from wine; but when he did eat, it was voraciously; when he did drink wine, it was copiously. He could practise abstinence, but not temperance.

...it was his misfortune that most of the men he knew preferred immaculate linen and their clubs to nakedness and the jungle. It was, of course, difficult to understand, yet it was very evident that they did.

One of the reasons for his drinking, Henry said, was John's mama used to make the whole family get down on their knees and pray like fury everytime John's daddy — Henry's first cousin, I believe — would come home boozed, and John never quite got it straight that they weren't thanking the good Lord for his blessing same as they did at the supper table. So according to Henry booze come to be sort of holy to him and with faith like that John grew up religious as a deacon.

Do you know what I think of history? … For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But Jack loved history so... No one'll ever know everything about Jack. But … history made Jack what he was … this lonely, little sick boy … scarlet fever … this little boy sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history … reading the Knights of the Round Table … and he just liked that last song. Then I thought, for Jack history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way, if it made him see the heroes, maybe other little boys will see. Men are such a combination of good and bad … He was such a simple man. But he was so complex, too. Jack had this hero idea of history, the idealistic view, but then he had that other side, the pragmatic side... his friends were all his old friends; he loved his Irish Mafia.