Tom Waits Quotes

I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me. The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was no time, in all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink. I began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. It was not long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words with a drink.

It's that idea that you can have one drink - and no you can't. Within a week I was drinking heavily. It was so quick that even I was like, 'Wow.'

First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man.

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.

You know a little drink now and then never hurt nobody, but when you can't git started without asking the bottle, you in trouble.

I'm glad I don't have a drinking problem,' I confided, 'because I don't think I'd ever be able to quit.

I can drink like a fish, or at least, someone born with fetal alcohol syndrome.

Drugs and alcohol were ruling my life. I made a lot of bad decisions while I was drinking alcohol. The first thing I stopped was cigarettes and tobacco.

Alcohol is an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind.

Drunks conjure an endless drama from their bottles.

Why do alcoholics begin down the same hazardous road day after day? They are in search of that elusive window of well-being that opens when you drink your way out of a hangover and aren't yet drunk all over again. The alcoholic's day consists of trying to keep that window open.

I'm not a heavy drinker, I can sometimes go for hours without touching a drop.

In my family, they were all big boozers.

I have a very powerful form of alcoholism. I finally gave up and accepted the fact that if I even smell too much booze, I'm going to start drinking again. That's just how I am.

Cigarettes, cigarettes were much tougher. Booze was tough And I had a real drinking problem before as we discovered in the hospital really, but the cigarettes are much tougher and to tell you the truth.

To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.

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

My old man's got a problem, he lives with the bottle.

As an alcoholic, you will violate your standards quicker than you can lower them.

The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help they have no hope.

Friend of mine just told me he used to be a bad alcoholic. I calmed him down. Told him he was a good alcoholic just a horrible drinker.

Alcoholism is the disease of more.

I think that I'm coming off as the biggest alcoholic in the world.

There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

Alcoholism is the only disease that you can get yelled at for having.