David Sheff Quotes

What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that's toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay.

If you're an addict, it controls your life and your life becomes uncontrollable. It's boring and painful, filling your system with something that makes you stare at your shoes for six hours.

It is hard to understand addiction unless you have experienced it.

There is a quality of selfishness that is associated with an individual when they are in the depths of addiction.

Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

I have an addiction. I have a mental illness.

Addiction is a neurological disease—a disease of the brain…. No one wakes up in the morning and says today ‘I want to become an addict.’

Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you are a millionaire conservative radio jock, which makes it an illness and needs our prayers for your recovery.

There's something messed up with my brain.

For me, addiction exposes all of the brain mechanism under the influence of a profoundly distorted primary motivation. It's such a window into how we function as human beings. And the patient doesn't know that's happening! Doesn't believe that's happening! That's the fascinating part.

I've got an addictive personality.

These diseases, both alcoholism and addiction, much like bipolar or depression and different illnesses, are still not seen as real diseases. People shy away from seeking help because it's viewed as being somewhat morally off the path, that they've lost their way.

. . . word-sniffing . . . is an addiction, like glue -- or snow -- sniffing in a somewhat less destructive way, physically if not economically. . . . As an addict, I am almost guiltily interested in converts to my own illness . . .

Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.

The worst thing that could have happened to me as an addict was having money.

When you're serious addict, you tend to lie a lot.

Boredom is a disease worse than cancer. Drugs cure it.

I've really been grappling with depression. It's all linked with my cocaine and ecstasy abuse.

I wasn't big in the party scene but I did have an excessive lifestyle. I had much more than I needed. I think that was a manifestation of a certain kind of mental illness.

I could do Rust In Peace again, but I don't want to. I could have followed that formula but, God, why? I would have to have done so much heroin and cocaine - and I wasn't going to. Not if I'm paying for it!

Every disposable job makes you partially suicidal. But I've always worked because I need to buy drugs and wigs so I could go out in drag and get wasted!

I drink a lot of beer, and that's the drug of choice. You find the drug that works for you. I know, for instance, this guy named Harlan Ellison - and he's not alone - who's very proud of the fact that he doesn't put dope into his body. He tries not to put additives into his body, or anything like that. But he can afford to do that because Harlan's drug of choice is Harlan.

When you take a lot of cocaine powder you tend to take a lot of alcohol with it as well, so for many years really I never went out without at least four or five grams of cocaine powder.

I've been a practicing alcoholic and drug addict for most of my life.