I drink to make other people more interesting.

In this epigram Nathan turns a common justification for drinking—seeking pleasure or escape—into a barbed social critique. The line implies that the problem is not the drinker’s inner life but the dullness of the surrounding company: alcohol becomes a tool for tolerating, reframing, or imaginatively embellishing other people. It also showcases Nathan’s characteristic urbane cynicism and theatrical wit, using a single sentence to puncture social pretension and expose the strain of forced sociability. The humor depends on inversion: the speaker claims not to drink for himself, but to make everyone else worth enduring.