Bill Wilson Quotes

I had such a wonderful life before drugs and alcohol abuse. I've got that life back now and plan to keep it. Maybe I had to go through what I did to get to this point, to appreciate this life more.

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.

When I stopped drinking... there were so many things I had to face that I didn't even realize were part of my makeup before. When you do that and have any changes that severe, you lose a lot of things, both good and bad.

I, myself, have not infrequently come across recovering addicts years later that I had given up on. It is like seeing a ghost come to life. The transformations can be astonishing.

When you get into recovery after some addiction you have to relearn a lot of perceptions, attitudes and self-awareness if you want to stay clean. You really do change. Change doesn't happen often but to a certain extent in some way, I think when you get into recovery and you stay there, you change.

When I got sober, that was 1990.

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.

Getting sober just exploded my life. Now I have a much clearer sense of myself and what I can and can't do. I am more successful than I have ever been. I feel very positive where I never did before, and I think that's all a direct result of getting sober.

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

I totally changed my life, changed my lifestyle.

I said, to hell with the whole thing, to hell with show business. I'm gonna make a new life for myself, and I got off drugs, completely kicked all that stuff.

I had to find the courage to turn my life around.

I began drinking alcohol at the age of thirteen and gave it up in my fifty sixth year; it was like going straight from puberty to a mid-life crisis.

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

When I finally embraced abstinence it was because of the simple urge to work a longer day. Thus, without joining Alcoholics Anonymous, I was at last able to leave Piss-Artists Notorious.

With God's help, I've not had a drink in nine and a half years. That's my whole story right there. And because of that, I'm doing this. I'm making records, I'm touring. I was so involved in just getting brain damaged, I wasn't doing anything. I had great ideas, many notebooks filled with notes, some of them I can read and some of them I just can't read, but I really didn't do anything constructive, it was all just good ideas. Now I'm trying to lead a constructive life a day at a time.

From 18 to 29 I was a heavy smoker, heavy drinker, drug addict, terrible eater and philanderer. The past eight years, since I got sober, have honestly been about trying to peel back each of those habits, to get back to the 12-year-old kid inside who was tremendously excited about life.

Recovery is an acceptance that your life is in shambles and you have to change it.

The sad fact is that the vast majority of drunks stay drunks. There's a small minority of us who reach that fork in the road where one side says 'live' and the other says 'drink'.

I went and did some things [rehab], and then of course my life didn't change that much [for a while], but I never missed work.

I believe in what I do. I mean, I don't go out - I don't have the clothes or drink anymore, I don't do drugs or any of that. I used to. But I got very ready to get me out of the house.

How dark it is before the dawn! In reality that was the beginning of my last debauch. I was soon to be catapulted into what I like to call the fourth dimension of existence. I was to know happiness, peace, and usefulness, in a way of life that is incredibly more wonderful as time passes.

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

I've been sober for so many years. It wasn't like you flick a switch, and you're sober. It takes a while. You have to learn how to do everything all over again. You can measure how long that takes in terms of years.

I think one of the myths is that people don't change. A lot of people believe that. Their spouse has been an alcoholic for the first 10 years of the marriage, and they say they are never going to change.