Tommy Kirk Quotes

In 1969, I gave up women and alcohol - it was the worst 20 minutes of my life.

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.

Drugs were pretty easy to quit taking. I was never addicted to anything to begin with. But then, liquor - I had to wait about another six years before I finally got around to quitting that. I'm sure glad I did.

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

It's so weird that I went to rehab. I always said that I would die before I went to rehab. But I thought, 'I'm going to stay here tonight.' And I stayed there for a month. It was great.

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.

I admire anyone who rids himself of an addiction.

Rehab is like a divorce.

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.

I have other obligations now - the show, my family, my life... though I know that without my sobriety I wouldn't have any of those things.

I do not understand rehab. If it works for people, then God bless them.

Marijuana you can give up, Iv given it up for fifteen years now and it never occurs to me to smoke it anymore.

Trying to overcome addiction is one of the hardest things for a person to do. And the fact that I had to do it under the scrutiny of tabloid press at first made it seem even more difficult. But in fact, it oddly ended up being a plus. Because of the tabloid stuff, it wasn't like I could walk into a bar and order a drink.

I had a real good thing going for me, and I got sidetracked. It doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be drugs. It doesn't have to be alcohol. That part of my life is over.

Well, I decided to stop. And I did. I stopped smoking, and I stopped speed at the same time.

In '85, I went through rehab and I wasn't ready. If you're not ready, you're not ready. You don't want to hear the truth, and you're gonna keep doing what you keep doing.

I had to come to terms about becoming an addict, which, for a long time, I lied to myself about the status of until I couldn't lie any more, 'cause I was either going to die or get better.

When I was straight, I had the courage and energy to become an actress. I owe my career to my will to stop using.

If I had to think of what I would do different in my whole career, it's that I never would have picked up a beer, bottle of vodka. That definitely changed my life. That is an Achilles' heel for me.

I was never at a place where rehab would have been appropriate.

When I first got sober, I hadn't read anything for six or seven years. I didn't have even that much focus.

I had not had any drugs for 5 years but then I relapsed again. I have also smoked nearly everything. Every day it was a battle to recover, which I fought for my son and myself.

Like so many addicts, I'd thought that if I could only sort out my life, I could then sort out my drinking. It was a revelation to see that it would be simpler the other way around

I finally came to the decision that I couldn't do it like that anymore. So I surrendered to that. I did (the Sabbath reunion tour) without anything - cigarettes, tobacco, dope, anything. And I had so much more fun without it.

I knew if I got loaded I was going away for a while. People would say, Oh, you're just sober because you're on probation.