Anthony Kiedis Quotes

1. Once you've seen a solution to the disease that's tearing you apart, relapsing is never fun.


2. The existence of sexual energy is such an every-day part of life. It's such a natural aspect of life. That we end up relating to without any shame.

3. I know my dad is a big Internet freak, and he's been known to be a Wikileaker.

4. Now I can look back and say I actually like the upbringing I had and my father was very attentive and a great educator.





5. There were times when all Hillel and I had was each other. We were f... up and understood what it was to be living in an out-of-control fog.

6. I didn't care if he was a genius or a f... idiot, he was rotting away, and it wasn't fun to watch.

7. Four years into the life of my son, I realize I'm so in love with him and he's so in love with me that if I don't find that lifelong partner out there, it's okay.

8. A certain amount of volatility and drama can me healthy and keep things fun and interesting if you're willing at any moment during a fight to say: "This means nothing. I love you, let's forget about it".

9. The fact that I was a junkie for a long time is only one slice of my own personal pie, which is made up of a lot of different slices.


10. Personally, I am stuck with one foot in the past and one foot in the present.


11. I think I'm still figuring out how to be a little less selfish.

12. One of the better definitions of insanity - doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting the result to be different.

13. He's the cosmic wizard of the band.


14. The road is not a problem.


15. I don't really feel superstitious. That's just the nature of life, the whole "battles lost and won" concept. I think we're very lucky because we love music so much and we love each other so much.

16. It was because all we wanted was each other's constant love and attention and for no one else to receive that love and attention, which is a selfish and difficult place to be in a relationship. We were emotionally retarded, and that was the best we could do at the time.

17. What I've realized over the years is that I have some pretty good friends.



18. Well, I get excited about music.



19. I've changed so much, but I kind of miss the blustery naiveti of young Anthony. I love that guy.

20. I never really had the intention of being a rock 'n' roller. It's just that all of my best friends were great musicians and they felt sorry for me so they had me. 

21. I knew there was never anyone to blame when people get into drugs. They're always responsible for their own behavior, and it's not the dealer, it's not the friend, it's not the bad influence, it's not the childhood.

22. The fact my relationship with my son is so good makes me forgiving of my father and also appreciative.

23. 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.





24. We did that with people like Chris Rock, Woody Harrelson and the environmentalist Julia Butterfly Hill.

25. Once I opened my mind to the concept of a greater power, I never struggled with it. Everywhere I went, I felt and saw the existence of a creative intelligence in this universe, of a loving power larger than myself in nature, in people, everywhere.

26. I find it hard to meet the right woman as people assume I'm a certain type of person - which I'm not.




27. In this particular place, the fact that people are so down with this record is not a result of us being flavor-of-the-moment or youth culture trend of the early '90s.

28. I was starting to come to grips with the fact that I had created a lot of pain and suffering around me, not just within me.

29. We'll have these people hang out with us while we're doing our touring, and talk to them and let them speak their piece to the world.

30. 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.

31. In terms of having high hopes that the level of consciousness will get higher and higher, yeah.

32. We were definitely on the contrarian tip. The funny thing is, at the time, I was so sworn to the punk rock, I couldn't even hear Duran Duran.





33. I was like a clock that had exploded - my springs were hanging out, my hands were cockeyed, and my numbers were falling off.

34. You know, I like to climb trees and ride bikes and play.

35. I walked away a little disheartened, thinking: "Oh well. I came a long way to meet the Wizard of Oz, but I guess I won't. Such is life."

36. Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

37. Time and distance have a way of playing tricks with your best intentions.

38. As a father now, I wouldn't do what my dad did, because it left me feeling emotionally unstable as a kid. But he didn't do the things he did out of selfishness or malice.



39. I think people that have fear that: "Oh if I have a kid I won't be able to do this and I won't be able to do that." It's kind of the opposite. It really gives you energy. It makes people better.

40. I had to sit with my senses. This clear, beautiful intuition took over. I knew exactly how I felt, and I wasn't confused or clouded or compromised. I realized that none of my feelings had diminished, but I might have to lose someone I truly loved. I didn't want to run away from Claire, but I knew drug addiction was strong enough that I had to be willing, if need be, to let go of the person I'd just fallen in love with.

41. I think there is always going to be inspired music and there are always going to be inspired listeners and there is always going to be an inspired method of getting it from A to B.



42. Every time you empty your vessel of that energy, fresh new energy comes flooding in.

43. I inherited my father's insatiable desire to meet all the beautiful girls in the world.






44. But then when he left, I realized that it was harder to write songs and feel spiritually connected to art and music as a band. When he came back I felt it again, instantaneously.

45. And I have a few friends that I think would go to bat for me no matter what. Flea is definitely one of them. Guy Oseary is one of them.


46. Music itself was color-blind but the media and the radio stations segregate it based on their perceptions of the artists.

47. Changing and inventing new things is great. That's what we like to do.

48. I never really thought in terms of the concept of being a rock star - being around people like that just seemed like normal day-in-the-life stuff to me. Those were just the surroundings I grew up in.

49. Having a moment of clarity was one thing; I'd had moments like that before. It had to be followed with a dedicated push of daily exercise. It's a trite axiom, but practice DOES make perfect. If you want to be a strong swimmer or an accomplished musician, you have to practice. It's the same with sobriety, though the stakes are higher. If you don't practice your program every day, you're putting yourself in a position where you could fly out of the orbit one more time.

50. I think art is inherently nonviolent and it actually occupies your mind with creation rather than destruction.





51. Suddenly we could all hear, we could all listen, and instead of being caught up in our finite little balls of bullshit, we could all become players in that great universal orchestra again.

52. When I was younger, I used to hate Germany. I hated the country, the people, the language, the culture, everything! But over the years I've grown to really appreciate the German people.

53. She was probably the girl I loved the most of all my girlfriends, but also the toughest one to make things work out with. If I had put that much effort into any of my other relationships, I'd be married with five kids now.





54. I have to laugh at myself.

55. She wasn't about to go down that road herself, which was a testament to her spiritual awakening and her commitment to sanity. It was a real blessing that she didn't follow me, because oftentimes, people go out together and one comes back and the other doesn't. Or both of them never do.

56. I've wanted to feel pleasure to the point of insanity. They call it getting high, because it's wanting to know that higher level, that godlike level. You want to touch the heavens, you want to feel glory and euphoria, but the trick is it takes work. You can't buy it, you can't get it on a street corner, you can't steal it or inject it or shove it up your ass, you have to earn it.

57. I had seen these transformations, people who had lost their will to live, coming back from their zombie states and radiating a new life force from their eyes.

58. I didn't really get to Led Zeppelin until I was in my 20s.

59. There was an uncommon array of people in there (rehab) with me, and I became friends with all of them. You recognize the possibility of your own demise in the lives of these other people. You're doing the same thing they are, but you can't see it in yourself. However, you start seeing all of these tragedies and potential miracles in other people. It's a real eye - and heart-opening situation.

60. There's not alcoholic in the world who wants to be told what to do. Alcoholics are sometimes described as egomaniacs with inferiority complexes. Or, to be cruder, a piece of shit that the universe revolves around.

61. I didn't see it happening, but the wheels were falling off of me. I didn't care about responsibilities like paying rent, I was just on a runaway train ride. The horribly ironic cosmic trick of drug addiction is that drugs are a lot of fun when you first start using them, but by the time the consequences manifest themselves, you're no longer in a position to say: "Whoa, gotta stop that." You've lost that ability, and you've created this pattern of conditioning and reinforcement. It's never something for nothing when drugs are involved.

62. You know I love pot, and I love beer, but I am totally sober, just because it completely stopped working for me.


63. My work was done, so it was time to start digging my grave again.


64. Every true artist is at war with the world.

65. And then I realized I was high. I loved the sensation. It felt like medicine to soothe the soul and awaken the senses. There was nothing awkward or scary - I didn't feel like I had lost control-in fact, I felt like I was in control.

66. If that's what you're thinking, then don't even question it. Go let your freak flag fly, brother.



67. What doesn't kill you only makes your book longer.

68. I know whatever my father did, in his own way, he still loved me.

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

70. (about kissing band mate David M. Navarro in the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Warped" video): It was totally spontaneous. It was no big deal. It was not any sort of contrived design to shock. The funny thing is people are so close-minded and uptight and freaked out by human contact of the same sex that it ended up having a shocking impact. Probably a lot of people couldn't handle it and decided they didn't like us. And that's okay, because to me it's more important to make someone that can relate to it feel good than to worry about people with a bad case of homophobia. I have a sneaking suspicion that there were probably a lot of frat guys out there who just could not handle the concept. But this is just my own imagination. Apparently the Russians love it though. They're kissers from way back.

71. I would have to say the person with whom I am most in love is definitely my son, Everly Bear. Although I'm his dad, I'm also his friend.




72. You instinctively know that nothing will ever be the same, and you have to carry that knowledge around with you like a huge weight. The next time you see your girl, you can't look her straight in the eyes the same way you did for all those years.

73. Adolescence is such a fun time in your life, because you think you know it all, and you haven't gotten to the point where you realize that you know almost nothing.

74. 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.

75. I like the idea of defying the convention of what it is to be in your 40s, or 50s, or 60s.

76. It seems like the chaos of this world is accelerating, but so is the beauty in the consciousness of more and more people.

77. 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".

78. When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn't otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought.

79. 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".

80. I was a little self-centered gutter punk in the early 1980s and all I wanted to do was diss everybody.

81. The reason the program is so successful is because alcoholics help other alcoholics. I've never met a Normie (our lingo for a person who doesn't have a problem with drugs and alcohol) who could even conceive of what it's like to be an alcoholic. Normies are always going: "There's this new pill you can take and you won't want to shoot heroin anymore." That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of alcoholism and drug addiction. These aren't just physical allergies, they're obsessions of the mind and maladies of the spirit. It's a threefold disease. And if it's partly a spiritual malady, then there's a spiritual cure.

82. If you want to get along with somebody, let them be right, and it will last longer.





83. I'm not a true vegan.

84. "Flea, you can't quit," I pleaded. "I'm going tо be the James Brown of the eighties".

85. I stopped hating and started just being. My whole life, I had been the most defensive person you'd meet, unable to tolerate any criticism. But now I started listening and being.








86. Having gone through it all had changed our outlooks. You can't be as much of a bitch as you were before, you can't be as much as an egomaniac, you can't feel as much like the world owed you something, you can't be the "where's mine?" guy.

87. We've just learned how to balance ourselves a little better so that we're happier way more of the time than not, and, you know, being happy is a radical and desirable act if you ask me.

88. A year jammed full of adventure and misadventure, strides forward and many steps backward, another year in my topsy-turvy, Jekyll-and-Hyde existence.

89. Nothing was working, and my friend was dead, and I didn't want to look at that.


90. We took off our clothes, and we were basically in a sphere of love and light and warmth, and the rest of the world disappeared. It was better than I ever could have dreamed, it was that thing I had been looking for, that love mixed with the rapture of sex.

91. I've acclimated to the music-while-exercising thing.

92. I remember thinking: "Sometimes you're riding high in April and shot down in June, but at least we have each other." We were full of enthusiasm and color, and you could sense that something was brewing that could be amazing, but we weren't quite there yet.

93. Also, we're all actually different blood types and we have one represented by each guy in the band.

94. 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.

95. When you're using drugs, you're driven by this mystical black energy, a force inside you that just won't quit. And the weaker you get, the more you feed into that energy, and the more it f… with you. When your spirit becomes dark and your lifestyle becomes dark, your existence is susceptible to infiltration by dark spirits. I've seen it so many times with addicts. You can see that they're controlled by dark energy, the way they look, their appearance, their voice, their behavior, it's not them.

96. The fact that my circumstances had changed drastically but my behavior hadn't was beginning to wear on me.


97. I'm probably not long-term-relationship material for now.

98. The drive downtown is an experience unto itself. You're controlled by this dark energy that's about to take you to a place where you know you don't belong at this stage in your life. You get on the 101 freeway and it's night and it's cool outside. It's a pretty drive, and your heart is racing, your blood is flowing through your veins, an it's kind of dangerous, because the people dealing are cut-throat, and there are cops everywhere. It's not your neck of the woods anymore, now you're coming from a nice house in the hills, driving a convertible Camaro.

99. It's weird, I was such a survivor and so wanted to be a part of life while I was trying to snuff out the life that was inside of me. I had this duality of trying to kill myself with drugs, then eating really good food and exercising and going swimming and trying to be a part of life. I was always going back and forth on some level.



100. I discovered surfing, which I absolutely fell in love with. That feels good and kind of keeps your body aligned, so does the salt water.

101. I kept going deeper and deeper into this world of repetition…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. A girl with no prior exposure to the disease had to be blissfully unaware of the nefarious tricks of the dope fiend. That's how I was able to get high all summer and autumn and pretend like it wasn't happening. I was saying: "I'm sick." I was deteriorating physically and emotionally. Jaime was tolerant, and it did speak well of her character, because she was not the type to abandon ship during a crisis. She didn't consider backing off or bowing out, she was just there, which I can't say about everybody. I don't know if I could say it even about myself.

102. The good news is that by the second year, those cravings were about as half as frequent, and by the third year, half as much again. I'm still a little bent, a little crooked, but all things crooked, I can't complain. After all those years of all kinds of abuse and crashing into trees at eighty miles an hour and jumping off buildings and living through overdoses and liver disease, I feel better now than I did ten years ago. I might have some scar tissue, but that's alright, I'm still making progress. 

103. My days are whatever I want them to be.

104. That's a spiritual lifestyle, being willing to admit that you don't know everything and that you were wrong about some things. It's about making a list of all the people you've harmed, either emotionally or physically or financially, and going back and making amends. That's a spiritual lifestyle. It's not a fluffy ethereal concept.

105. I don't even know what words to use to talk about the music industry anymore. But the business has changed a lot - the methods of releasing music.





106. My father rebelled ferociously against his conservative upbringing where his father physically abused him.

107. I had to educate him that there was no such thing as writer's block, that writers write when they write, and when they don't, they don't.

108. There's a peculiar thing that happens every time you get clean. You go through this sensation of rebirth. There's something intoxicating about the process of the comeback, and that becomes an element in the whole cycle of addiction. Once you've beaten yourself down with cocaine and heroin, and you manage to stop and walk out of the muck you begin to get your mind and body strong and reconnect with your spirit. The oppressive feeling of being a slave to the drugs is still in your mind, so by comparison, you feel phenomenal. You're happy to be alive, smelling the air and seeing the beauty around you...You have a choice of what to do. So you experience this jolt of joy that you're not where you came from and that in and of itself is a tricky thing to stop doing. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that every time you get clean, you'll have this great new feeling.

109. She had an ethereal, dreamy personality that was typified by her adamant refusal to wear her glasses despite terrible nearsightedness. I once asked her if she could see without them, and she said that things were very fuzzy. So why didn't she wear the glasses? "I really do prefer the world unclear" she said.



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