Celebrity Quotes

When I was young I did not care about what would happen when I got older and just kept drinking, but believe me, when you grow up you want to live a full life. I know I did, but I robbed myself of about 30 years.. and I cheated my son out of having his father.

"..utter financial ruin, horrendous car wrecks, injury and death. Prison sentences, wrecked marriages, degradation and humiliation far beyond anything I'd ever experienced. But as long as I continued to drink, any one of those fates could have been mine"

"What alcoholics do to themselves becomes a mechanical process of destruction. We become machines that, although malfunctioning, refuse to come to a halt..only death turns off the ignition. For the fortunate few, a braking system as intangible as the sickness itself goes into operation, and a realisation begins to form that shows the utter futility of it all."

"Some people can drink, but I can't. It turns me into someone else. I didn't just fall off the wagon, I crashed into a brick wall."

He takes a long swig from a bottle.."See? It's Pepsi-Cola. Once that would have been whisky and I wouldn't have stopped drinking until somebody poured me into bed. It used to be beer all day, whisky all night and Satan-knows-what in between.  I was on the verge of becoming a dead hero like so many of my drinking pals-Keith Moon, Jim Morrison, Harry Nilsson. I began coughing up blood. But my wife pulled me back from the brink." She said, " Your fake blood on stage looks great. But the real blood in the bathroom means you're a hospital case". "Now I save the wild stuff for the stage. The rest of the time I'm straight, clean and sober. I realised it was better to be a living legend than a dead one".

"In the late Sixties I was in physical danger. And you have to live with the tremendous guilt. I had a young family. The only way you can get rid of this guilt is with the anaesthetic of drink. Every morning you think: 'Never again' ..You have a cocktail and you wonder what the fuss was about."

"Alcoholics do not drink like other people. They drink in order to change the world. It is a different kind of reality. A counterfeit experience. You think you can recapture youthful rapture, but you can't."

Gruber is talking openly about her addiction with the hope of helping other people addicted to alcohol..
"I believe it's important for people to know that there are people in all walks of life who come from hell and fight their way out"

The pattern was always much the same. Something, anything, would set me off. For heaven's sake, there were enough reasons to drink-poor me, let's pour another.  ..One friend in particular never counted the cost of her time or lost patience with me. She was at my bedside when I came round. She never berated me or questioned what I had done. Instead she suggested I eat ( a physical impossibility between throwing-up, retching and shaking). She also urged me to keep in touch. The most important thing I learnt was that "the first drink does the damage" If I didn't have the first one I wouldn't want the next one.

"Initially, when I got clean and sober there was nothing there. I was an empty shell. I needed to start life again in a different way because when you take away the addictions you're left with a spiritually and emotionally bankrupt person.

It would be very foolish of me to feel I've overcome my illness. If I forget where I came from and what it was like, I risk going back there. There are no holidays from this illness. The price of freedom is constant vigilance and so I have a support system. I attend recovery meetings every week and will do so for the rest of my life.

I don't find life particularly easy at times and there have been difficult moments over the years, but alcohol and drugs are no longer an option-they're non-negotiable. I've now developed the skills I need to deal with whatever life throws at me without running away and resorting to my old coping mechanisms."

..he had been drinking three bottles a day.." I couldn't see further than a bottle of whisky. I wanted to die. I really wanted to just die"..The Paul Gascoigne who sits in front of me today has not had a drink for a year. And he feels much better for it.