John Waters Quotes

Everyone reaches their point in time where either they die or they get sick of doing drugs. It started getting debilitating. I enjoy my music a lot better than my drugs.

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

When I got sober, that was 1990.

I was an alcoholic, for sure. It became a problem steadily over the course of six years.

'Cause I was already a smoker, it was easy to get addicted. The one thing that they don't teach you about marijuana is how addictive it is.

I had always turned it down-to me, smoking pot was absolutely the worst thing in the world. I thought of it as an addiction, and all my friends who smoked it, I felt they really needed help.

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.

Anybody that's not supportive of me staying sober obviously has to go. But on the other hand, there are not really a lot of people who don't want me to stay sober. I was a nightmare.

I stopped doing drugs when I was 20. I was finished with drugs before Nirvana even started.

People who have never had an addiction don't understand how hard it can be.

Because I know I'm an addict, and I know I'm an alcoholic.

Sobriety was the greatest gift I ever gave myself. I don't put it on a platform. I don't campaign about it. It's just something that works for me. It enabled me to really connect with another human being - my wife, Sheryl - which I was never able to do before.

People always want to ask me about my drug problem - I never had a drug problem; I had a self-esteem problem!

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 didn't do drugs. It wasn't my thing. But the drink was terrible. Today when I look back, it's like I was another person. You could call it a coping mechanism, but that would be an excuse. I just drank too much.

I messed around in high school, but I pretty much put it away until I did a television show in San Francisco.

People are saying that I'm an alcoholic, and that's not true, because I only drink when I work, and I'm a workaholic.

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.

When I first went up to see my editor, I was with my agent, and my editor said, 'Well, what have you been doing all these years?' And my agent said, 'He's been in recovery. From his childhood.'

Sobriety has a way of allowing a person to begin to realize that the things that you do have consequences for the people that love you.

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

I've always thought in the back of my mind I could do something really special with my life and I was just on a real path to not achieving that, and I blame that on alcohol.

The sad thing is, people don't want to believe that the person they're in love with is out of his mind, drinking and using, so if you give them even half an excuse, they're going to want to believe it.

I was hiding out from the celebrity thing, I was smoking way too much dope, I was sitting on the couch, and just turning into a doughnut, and I really got irritated with myself.

I'm a very disciplined person when it comes to my work, but discipline can't save m from being a drug addict.