A Quote by Harry Reems

I met with a bad bout after the trial was over, and while the trial was on I habit of stopping by the liquor store and buying a bottle of wine every night. Just to forget the days courtroom proceedings. Then the next morning I'd get up, go to court again and do it all over again. Well, by 1985, I was a fall down, low bottom drunk. An alcoholic. And in 1989, I finally got sober. And I found the rooms of a 12 Step Recovery Program. And I diligently worked those 12 Steps, and I have changed my life dramatically. I'm happily married. I converted to Christianity.
If I didn't find out, or learn, that I was an alcoholic and I didn't take the 12 Steps of Recovery, I wouldn't be the person I am today. So, I would do it again in a heartbeat.
There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne - bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive. One only feels really free when one can go in whatever direction one pleases over the plains, to get to the river at sundown and pitch one's camp, with the knowledge that one can fall asleep beneath other trees, with another view before one, the next night.
Most lawyers aren't trial lawyers. Most lawyers, even trial lawyers, don't get their problems solved in a courtroom. We like to go to court. It seems heroic to go to court. We think we're the new, great advocates, better than anything we've seen on TV, and we come home exhilarated by having gone to court.
I made three or four different fonts during 'Short Term 12' -' it was how I'd calm my mind between scenes. I have graph paper and gel pens, and I would do the alphabet: just do 'a' over and over again until I got it perfect and then go to 'b' and then 'c'.
While in the clinic, I discovered I had problems with concentration, motivation, attitude, and temper. I have found a new way of life through the clinic's program and a 12-step recovery plan.
Ever bike? Now that's something that makes life worth living!... Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds, avoiding collisions, at twenty miles or more an hour, and wondering all the time when you're going to smash up. Well, now, that's something! And then go home again after three hours of it... and then to think that tomorrow I can do it all over again!
I realized I had it made because you don't have to destroy anything to get honey. You can just use the same things over and over again, put it in a quart canning jar, and you've got $12.
When I go into the garden, I forget everything. It's uncomplicated in my world of gardening. It's trial and error, really. If something doesn't work, it comes out, and you start all over again.
So, it's a continual process of trial and error and then I find things and I throw it out and start again, but I keep writing it over again.
Now I am practicing as well as a criminal defense lawyer in handling appeals. The court of appeals appointed me to handle cases and although that's not trial work and I don't have to go to court, it kind of satisfies the need I have to practice still and I have transitioned into readiness not to be in trial anymore. It took a little while for me to get used to not doing it and I did miss it for a few years, but eventually I transferred into another life.
I have a tradition of working with actors, over and over again. I've worked with Jason Bateman, over and over again. You get to know an actor, and you get a certain trust and a comfort, and you become really good friends, and you feel like you've got a short-hand.
With Keith's [my fiance] murder, I was changed. I thought I would be a prosecutor forever, but there were so many days when I would leave the courtroom during a trial, and go down the hall to the ladies' room, and go into a little stall, and cry.
If you're going to be a writer you should sit down and write in the morning, and keep it up all day, every day. Charles Bukowski, no matter how drunk he got the night before or no matter how hungover he was, the next morning he was at his typewriter. Every morning. Holidays, too. He'd have a bottle of whiskey with him to wake up with, and that's what he believed. That's the way you became a writer: by writing. When you weren't writing, you weren't a writer.
For being human, we remember and forget. We stray and return, fall down and get up, and cling and let go, again and again. But it is this straying and returning that makes life interesting, this clinging and letting go - damned as it is - that exercises the heart.
This is the most dangerous trial of all, when there is no trial and every thing goes well; for then a man is tempted to forget God, to become too bold and to misuse times of prosperity.
I stopped performing because I don't have the temperament of a performer. You have to want to do the same thing over and over again. Once I got it right, I didn't want to do it again. I always use the analogy of a novelist who has to read his novel in public night after night. I just didn't want to do it.
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