People don't grow up to become thrill junkies - they're born like that.

Sometimes you're flush and sometimes you're bust, and when you're up, it's never as good as it seems, and when you're down, you never think you'll be up again, but life goes on.

That's a terrible price to pay because you loved life so much, with the intensity of a thousand suns, and the women and all of it - and then it's all taken away from you. You end up walking the hallways of always to a place called tedium and apathy, day after day after day. Years go by.

Life passes most people by while they're making grand plans for it.

I was snorting a lot of cocaine and I had lost myself to a great degree. A lot of people, everybody was starting to realize what the coke was all about and they were all starting to get lost.

I thought cocaine was a fantastic drug. A wonder drug, like everybody else. It gave you [an] energy burst. You could stay awake for days on end, and it was just marvelous and I didn't think it was evil at all.

In fact, I was welcomed. There were movie stars and rock stars. I became a pot star. I glorified in that. And of course as time wore on the business began to expand and grow. It went from more or less a college fun thing to a serious business. As the money grew, the power grew.