“...whatever I ended up doing with my life,I wanted to people feel the way this music was making me feel.”

“...for the first time in my life, a voice went off in my head:'You have no power over what happens in your life. Drugs dictate exactly what you're going to do. You've taken your hands off the steering wheel, and you're going wherever the drug world takes you.'That had never changed. The feeling would well up inside of me, and no matter how much I loved my girl or my band or my friends or my family, when that siren song 'Go get high now' started playing in my head, I was off.”

“I'm sure there was some bloated-ego thing happening that I wasn't able to recognize, but I didn't feel like it would last for long. The weird thing is that long before we ever had success on a commercial level, I had already developed a sense of entitlement. I had an unnecessary, unwarranted, unfounded, self-centered sense of entitlement from childhood. In elementary school, I always felt like I should be the president of the school and that I was somehow above the law of the school and I could break the rules. When I moved in with my father, he was arrogant and full of himself, and that carried on to me, so I always had this sense of entitlement and a semi-false sense of self. I would steal because I had that sense, whether it was houses or cars or furniture or cactuses, whatever I understand how people can be cold and ruthless criminals, because I remember at that point in my life, I did not think of the consequences for anybody else involved except me. And the consequences for me were that I got what I wanted.”

“It didn't matter if I got bitten by a dog or I ripped my pants on the fence post or I poked myself in the eye with a tree branch that I was crawling over, it was all about the shortcut. My whole life I took the shortcut, and I ended up lost.”

“I didn't have to go all the way to India for spiritual enlightenment. The blue-collar spirituality of everyday life was right in front of me, it was in every nook and cranny if I wanted to seek it, but I had chosen to ignore it.”

“There wasn't any single moment of bedazzling revelation, it was more of an education process. The more I learned about the nature of addiction, the more I was willing to look at my own behavior and history. And the more I was able to help the people I was in there with, the more it all made sense. A lot of this process came through witnessing the sickness of these people I was in rehab with, for me to see these people and care about them, and to know how slim their chances were of ever changing the demonic possession they had been living with. I realized this was not the jail I wanted to live my life in.”

“When John left the band, I resented him for not being my friend and for abandoning our musical comradeship. But all the time that he was out of the band and going through his anguish, I prayed for him constantly. From going to meetings I'd learned that one of the reasons that alcoholics get loaded is because they harbor resentments. One of the techniques they teach to get rid of a resentment toward somebody is to pray for him or her to get everything that you want for yourself in life-to be loved, to be successful, to be healthy, to be rich, to be wonderful, to be happy, to be alive with the light and the love of the universe. It's a paradox, but it works. You sit there and pray for the person you can't stand to get everything on earth that you would want for yourself, and one day you're like 'I don't feel anything bad toward this person.”