James Ellroy Quotes

Redemption means you just make a change in your life and you try to do right, versus what you were doing, which was wrong. So I think a lot of people get hooked on drugs and when they get over that addiction they go out and they try to talk to kids and they try to work in rehab centers.

Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child. Of the three, finding my sobriety was the hardest thing.

I, myself, have not infrequently come across recovering addicts years later that I had given up on. It is like seeing a ghost come to life. The transformations can be astonishing.

I was actually grateful for being arrested, for the judge that promised me that I would go to prison if I didn't stay clean, because I listened to him and something clicked. Those two years when we were making album "Ultra" and I had to go back and forth to court to prove to the judge that I'd stayed clean, it gave me this time to suddenly realize, "Oh, I can do this, I can crawl my way back, I can get better. And I do want to be here."

I was an opportunist and got away with things because I was very young, but I went to prison and came out and remade my life.

If I were to try to identify a turning point I'd say that was it - getting clean.

I said, to hell with the whole thing, to hell with show business. I'm gonna make a new life for myself, and I got off drugs, completely kicked all that stuff.

I like to think that even if we make some really bad choices and go down some bad paths, we'll eventually emerge from it.

During my time in prison, I told myself that I wanted to be a part of the solution and not the problem.

The first thought that I had about really trying to get sober was, 'Man, I could do a lot of good in the world. I can lead by example and just be this heroic recovery guy.' And that's just a bad reason to get sober. You can't get sober for anybody's benefit, let alone the world at large. You really got to do it for yourself.

So I kind of lost track for a while, then I came back, I pulled myself together and I decided when I was 15 that I'm going to get sober and I'm going to become an actress.

When I was writing 'Southeastern,' I'd just recently gotten sober. For me, that was a major turning point in my life. It changed things I did on a day-to-day basis. My whole routine was upended. It took me some time to get used to that and figure out how do I keep myself entertained.

When I finally got sober, I moved towards what I might have been if I hadn't been destroying myself when I was young.

Prison was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I used and abused drugs and alcohol. When I stopped doing that it became a lot clearer that life goes from inside to giving as opposed to taking and destroying.

I was such a heavy drinker I was going to die at age 37. Not to mention the drugs. I'm glad to be sober, I haven't missed a thing. A lot of people never get the chance to come back.

The Class Clown album was done totally sober. I'd realized what a hell I'd made for myself and I cleaned up completely for three months. You can hear the clarity of my thinking and of my speech on that album.

I'm making plans to go away for a month to focus on my sobriety and to continue my life in recovery. Please enjoy making fun of me on the world wide web.

I was heading in a self destructive direction. My priority wasn't together, wasn't in order. So me getting locked up was actually a blessing for me. It helped for me to see the light. Once you get the rug snatched from under you - I had my career and family snatched from me, and I was forced to just sit there in that box for three years and think about what I did and how selfish I was, it made me really see things with new eyes, like, hold up, why was I doing that? What the hell was I thinking about? I gotta change. Something's got to give. I can't ever come back in this place again.

I'm an example of why people deserve second chances.

I was a really bad kid. Then, I got sweet as I got older.

My main focus in sobriety has been to replace fear with faith or love.

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.

I could have easily gone down the wrong path and dropped out of school, but I was given a second chance.

Until I went to rehab, I didn't understand what it did.