Tracy Chapman Quotes

I know I was an alcoholic because I was preoccupied whether alcohol was going to be served or not.

In my family, they were all big boozers.

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.

We have to do more about addiction, not only drugs, but also alcohol.

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.

I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.

I know I can get to the stage where I'm drinking a lot. I tend to be rotten and groggy all day and hanging out for the next drink and five o'clock, ping! I have to just stop.

I never had one beer. If I bought a six-pack of beer, I kept drinking till all six beers were gone. You have to have that kind of understanding about yourself. I haven't had a drink now in 12 years.

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.

All men, even those we call savages, have been so tormented by the passion for strong drinks, that limited as their capacities were, they were yet able to manufacture them.

An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.

But if I wasn't playing, I would drink Saturdays, then Sunday, then Monday. Then I would try and train and it was no good, then have another drink just to pass the day away.

I knew at quite a young age that I had an issue with drinking.

I had what AA calls 'a convincer' - which made me realize that I couldn't do it any more. I went out drinking for about 70 hours here in London. At the end I knew I was done.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

One drink is too many for me and a thousand not enough.

But who is it that has made my people drunk? Indians cannot make whiskey. Indians do not sell it. But white people make it and bring it among us. It is they that have brought the evil upon us and we cannot remove it. The white people can remove it and now we call upon them to do it. We ask them to take their whiskey and run away, and leave us sober as they found us.

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

It is an unhappy thing that in later years a Kind of Drink called Rum has been common among us. They that are poor and wicked, too, can for a penny make themselves drunk.

If you think I'm a drunk, you shoulda seen my old man.

My relationship with alcohol became unsustainable. For people who are going to ask, 'Were you an alcoholic?' I suppose the short answer is 'Yes.'

I think I was an alcoholic. There are all these grey areas about what makes you an alcoholic - you can't cope without it, you stop caring about jobs and relationships, or you just binge.

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.

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.

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.'