Allen Carr > Quotes

“The whole business of smoking is like forcing yourself to wear tight shoes just to get the pleasure of taking them off.”
― Allen Carr, The Easyway to Stop Smoking

“Wouldn’t that be an incredibly stupid thing to do? To say ‘I never want to smoke again’, then spend the rest of your life saying ‘I’d love a cigarette.’ That’s what smokers who use the Willpower Method do. No wonder they feel so miserable. They spend the rest of their lives desperately moping for something that they desperately hope they will never have.”
― Allen Carr, Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Be a Happy Non-smoker for the Rest of Your Life

“However, you cannot force smokers to stop, and although all smokers secretly want to, until they are ready to do so a pact just creates additional pressure, which increases their desire to smoke. This turns them into secret smokers, which further increases the feeling of dependency.”
― Allen Carr, Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Be a Happy Non-smoker for the Rest of Your Life

“Responsibility becomes stressful only when you don’t feel strong enough to handle it.”
― Allen Carr, Easy Way to Stop Smoking

“The main reason that smokers find it difficult to quit is that they believe that they are giving up a genuine pleasure or crutch. It is absolutely essential to understand that there is nothing to ‘give up’.”
― Allen Carr, The Easyway to Stop Smoking

“The moment you stop smoking, everything that goes wrong in your life is blamed on the fact that you’ve stopped smoking. Now when you have a mental block, instead of just getting on with it you start to say, ‘If only I could light up now, it would solve my problem.’ You then start to question your decision to quit smoking.”
― Allen Carr, Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Be a Happy Non-smoker for the Rest of Your Life

“There are people who can make love standing on a hammock, but it is not the easiest way.”
― Allen Carr, Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Be a Happy Non-smoker for the Rest of Your Life

“The cigarette gets the credit for everything and the blame for nothing.”
― Allen Carr, The Easyway to Stop Smoking

“Eight hours after putting out a cigarette, you are 97% nicotine-free. After just three days of not smoking, you are 100% nicotine-free.”
― Allen Carr, The Easyway to Stop Smoking

“The only reason any smoker lights a cigarette is to try to end the empty, insecure feeling that the previous cigarette created.”
― Allen Carr, Easy Way to Stop Smoking

“Why would anyone want to drink a poisonous, highly addictive drug that tastes foul; a drug that will shorten your life, debilitate your immune system and impede your concentration; a drug that will destroy your nervous system, your confidence, your courage and your ability to relax? Why would you want to take a drug that will cost you about £100,000/$160,000 in your lifetime and do absolutely nothing for you whatsoever?”
― Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Control Alcohol

“You might well get that feeling of a void or wanting a drink, particularly over the next few days. If and when it happens, reverse it immediately. Just remind yourself, “This is the death throes of that goblin on my back. It’s what drinkers suffer throughout their drinking lives. Isn’t it marvellous: I’M FREE!” That way the slight pangs immediately become moments of pleasure. Get into the habit of doing that over the next few days. Unless you reverse those pangs immediately, you will be doubting your decision. Remember, any slight aggravation that you might suffer over the next few days is not because you stopped drinking, but because you started. Non-drinkers don’t have this problem.”
― Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Control Alcohol

“Part of the ingenuity of any addictive drug is to fool you into believing that life without it won’t be as enjoyable, and/or that you’ll be less able to cope with stress.”
― Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Control Alcohol

“Quite simply, the key to being a happy non-smoker is to remove the desire to smoke. With no desire to smoke, it takes no Willpower not to do so.”
― Allen Carr, The Easyway to Stop Smoking

“Smokers do not smoke because they enjoy it. They do it because they are miserable without it.”
― Allen Carr, Easy Way to Stop Smoking

“The moment you stop smoking, everything that goes wrong in your life is blamed on the fact that you’ve stopped smoking.”
― Allen Carr, The Easyway to Stop Smoking

“Modern man threw a brick through his own window in order to sell himself a burglar alarm.”
― Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Control Alcohol

“Alcohol is a chemical depressant and a powerful poison. It destroys us both physically and mentally. By inebriating us, it destroys every survival instinct that we possess and takes the joy of life with it. In short: it makes us feel suicidal. And that’s what it amounts to: SLOW AGONIZING SUICIDE”
― Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Control Alcohol

“What you really enjoy in an alcoholic drink is not the drink itself, but the ending of the irritation of wanting that drink. Non-drinkers enjoy that all the time.”
― Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Control Alcohol

“Because when you feel physically and mentally low, molehills become mountains, slight set-backs seem like disasters, and the smallest problem tends to be the final straw to break the camel’s back.”
― Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Control Alcohol

“Whenever you think about smoking you must see it as a lifetime’s chain of filth, disease, fear, misery and slavery.”
― Allen Carr, The Easyway to Stop Smoking

“If you were in control of your smoking, you wouldn’t be reading this book. If you could simply choose whether to smoke or not, you would choose to be a nonsmoker.”
― Allen Carr, Allen Carr's Easy Way to Quit Smoking Without Willpower - Includes Quit Vaping: The best-selling quit smoking method updated for the 21st century

“It’s a powerful poison and will shorten your life considerably. It is also highly addictive, will debilitate your immune system and impede your concentration. It will systematically destroy your nervous system, your confidence, your courage and your ability to relax. By the way, it tastes awful and will cost you about £100,000/$160,000 in your lifetime. What does it do for you? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!”
― Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Control Alcohol

“Living with an alcohol problem is just like living with an abusive partner. It leaves you physically battered, destroys your confidence and self-esteem, yet makes you feel perversely dependent on your abuser. The only difference is that you can walk out on drink any time you like and no one will try to stop you.”
― Allen Carr, Allen Carr's Easy Way for Women to Quit Drinking: The original Easyway method

“Alcohol doesn’t benefit anybody except the industry that peddles it. There is no demarcation line between “normal” drinking and problem drinking; it is all part of the same disease. The problem drinker is just at a more advanced stage.”
― Allen Carr, Allen Carr's Easy Way for Women to Quit Drinking: The original Easyway method

“Get it clear in your mind: CIGARETTES DO NOT FILL A VOID. THEY CREATE ONE! These bodies of ours are the most”
― Allen Carr, The Easyway to Stop Smoking

“You need to stop thinking “I can never ever have another drink”, and start thinking how wonderful it will be when you can stop poisoning yourself.”
― Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Control Alcohol

“Client: “Could you teach me to have an occasional drink and not get hooked again?” Me: “Of course I could. I could even teach you to take the occasional dose of arsenic.” Client: “Why on earth would I want you to do that?” Me: “Exactly!”
― Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Control Alcohol

“If you could isolate the physical feeling, it would barely register as a small itch. I call this the Little Nicotine Monster. There is also a Big Monster in your mind. This is the brainwashing that tells you smoking is your crutch, your pleasure, and that you can’t live without it. When the nicotine level in your body falls, the Little Nicotine Monster triggers a pang around the stomach area which the Big Monster interprets as: “I want a cigarette.” This is the nicotine trap—the ingenious way that cigarettes turn smokers into slaves. Each cigarette causes the craving for the next, to fill the emptiness caused by the nicotine leaving your body. And so it goes on, ad infinitum.”
― Allen Carr, Allen Carr's Easy Way to Quit Smoking Without Willpower - Includes Quit Vaping: The best-selling quit smoking method updated for the 21st century

“You could argue that you made a rational decision to try your first few drinks. I won’t argue with that. But supposing a confidence trickster had persuaded you to buy shares in a company that didn’t exist. You made a decision to invest in the company, a decision that was rational given what you knew at the time. But in retrospect you would hardly describe yourself as being in control of the situation. Likewise when you sampled alcohol for the first time you believed there was some benefit to doing so. But the so-called benefits are in fact illusions, and always have been. So the reason that you began sampling alcohol, whether it be brainwashing, peer pressure or whatever, is completely irrelevant. YOU WERE CONNED!”
― Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Control Alcohol