Malachy McCourt Quotes

I drank for about 25 years getting over the loss of my father and I took the anger out on myself. I did a good job at beating myself up at sometimes. I don't drink anymore but my alcoholic head occasionally says different. 'Nil By Mouth' was a love letter to my father because I needed to resolve some issues in order to be able to forgive him.

I hate to be fatalistic about it, but alcoholism, it's just in your genes. We had some of it in my family, and it just got me.

My father was ruined by hard drink - he sat on an icicle.

I didn't know my dad for a long time. My dad was on drugs and my dad was at the VA Hospital, my dad was off in his own world selling drugs or using them or there would be crack heads in the house or whatever it would be.

But when alcohol comes in, start running. Because there's a demon there, and it goes back to her childhood.

'Master Harold' is about me as a little boy, and my father, who was an alcoholic. There's a thread running down the Fugard line of alcoholism. Thankfully I haven't passed it on to my child, a wonderful daughter who's stone-cold sober. But I had the tendency from my father, just as he had had it from his father.

Alcoholism is a genetically predisposed disease and it does run in my family. I also think I felt like a misfit. I was in the South, everybody was blonde. I just didn't feel like I fitted in. It was sort of my way of fitting.

There are zillions of people who say that alcoholism is a disease, but not many of them believe it.

Half of what creates psychopaths is genetic, but the other half is conditioning.

Scientists announced that they have located the gene for alcoholism. Scientists say they found it at a party, talking way too loudly.

I'm tired of hearing sin called sickness and alcoholism a disease. It is the only disease I know of that we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spread.

I grew up around a lot of aggressive guys. My parents used to take me to AA meetings when I was very young. So I know aggression, I know insanity.

My mother was a professional sick person; she took a lot of pain pills. There are many people like that. It's just how they are used to getting attention. I always remember she's the daughter of alcoholics who'd leave her alone at Christmas time.

I had to accept that I was an alcoholic, that was the main thing. I think you've got to. But I try not say that I'm an alcoholic. I prefer to say that it's a disease I've got.

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.

But I'll tell you something: We had a big family discussion about it recently, my two sisters and I, and I pointed out that we all have the same genes as our mother and we're all susceptible to becoming alcoholics.

The alcoholic suffers from a disease.

I refer to the fact, acknowledged now by all professionals in the field, that alcoholism as such is not a legal problem—it is a health problem.

Black people are killing themselves with alcohol ... it is a scourge of our neighborhoods. It's a disease that feeds on our people.

If we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class.

A river of grog is killing people and destroying our communities. Spiritually, socially, psychologically, there is a total breakdown in families where people are drunk most of the time -- the children are not safe.

My dad was an alcoholic, growing up, so I knew how scary that was from a child's perspective - the volatility.

My dad was a violent alcoholic. Really aggressive.

I'm in the pink of health except for the weight I put on because I'm now a stressful producer. But being the daughter of an alcoholic makes you four times more susceptible to becoming one.

My dad was a serious alcoholic, and ultimately, that's why he died. When you're a child of someone who struggled with things like that, you look for the common thread. Is there a pattern? Is there an inheritance of pathology in some way? That haunts me.