Bill Wilson Quotes

I never wanted to be the guy people looked at. I felt I could only be myself when I was alone, that I turned into some kind of novelty. The only way I could get through that time was to drink. I poisoned myself with alcohol for years but I've never been into drugs in the way it was sometimes made out.

It's funny, because my last record was a lot about isolation and people living in separate worlds that other people can't even understand, which drug addiction is the perfect negative example of.

When I hear alcoholics talk about having their demons, I think that they're probably absolutely literally correct.

But there's no joy at all, people say "Oh well he's drunk and happy let him sleep it off"--The poor drunkard is *crying*--He's crying for his mother and father and great brother and great friend, he's crying for help. (p.111)

And I have always told the patients when I talk to them. When they come around and say, 'What will you have to drink? Oh that's right you don't drink.' Just speak up and say, 'Of course I drink. But I just don't drink alcohol.'

I'm a recovering alcoholic so I should be home.

Writing is a lonely job unless you're a drinker, in which case you always have a friend within reach.

I used to be a drinker but I found out how bad it was and I let it alone.

I can choose to accelerate my disease to an alcoholic death or incurable insanity, or I can choose to live within my thoroughly human condition.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

Like many alcoholics, I was a staggering woman in a chic apartment, sick and utterly disgusting.

I began drinking alcohol at the age of thirteen and gave it up in my fifty sixth year; it was like going straight from puberty to a mid-life crisis.

Mr. Speaker, as a grateful recovering alcoholic of 24 years myself, I am living proof that treatment does work and that recovery is real.

I just think my body can't handle it any more. I did try a little drink a while back, and I was actually physically ill. I went into an immediate depression, and felt awful, just dreadful. So that's it. I'm over it now.

The alcoholic suffers from a disease.

I've been living with anxiety much, much, much longer than I've been with living with alcoholism, that's for sure. I already knew from the sheer numbers and all the data that I'm not alone. I mean, the biggest mistake I did was spending most of my life thinking I was the only person who felt this way.

When I was Surgeon General, I spent a lot of time talking to people in living rooms and town halls all across the country, and one of the things I started to notice was that behind many of the stories of addiction, violence, depression and anxiety were threads of loneliness.

Above anything else - above family or job - the main thing is staying sober. That's because without being sober, I don't have a family.

The most evil and insidious thing about mental illness is that it isolates us and makes us feel so different that we think no one can possibly relate.

If you don't know someone who's had a problem with addiction, you will.

Why is it a badge of honour to say you spent 15 years in AA ball?

People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.

I was poisoning myself with alcohol and medicating myself. I was trying to numb things. I was trying not to feel things, and that's ridiculous. It's one of the dumbest things you can do, because all you're doing is postponing the inevitable. Someday you'll have to look all those things in the eye rather than try to numb the pain.

As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind.

I was struggling with drugs, I had a lot on my plate, and you know, I was using unhealthy ways to kind of self-medicate and deal with a lot of heavy duty stuff in my life.