Antoine had never touched a drop of alcohol. Even when he injured himself slightly, when he grazed himself, good abstainer that he was, he would refuse to disinfect the wound with 60-proof alcohol, preferring to use antiseptic creams.
At home there had been no wine and no aperitifs. Later, he had been contemptuous of using fermented or distilled concoctions to compensate for a lack of imagination or to dispel the effects of depression.
Having noticed that when people are drunk their ideas are vague and quite unrelated to any notion of reality, that their sentences seem perfectly satisfied with incoherence, and, to cap it all, that they themselves seem to think they are uttering profound truths, Antoine decided to adhere to this promising philosophy. Drunkenness seemed a good way to suppress any tendency his intellect might have to reflect on life. If he were drunk, he would no longer need to think, he would no longer be able to: his rhetoric would consist of lyrical, eloquent, and voluble approximations.
Martin Page, describing the character Antoine in How I Became Stupid
