Life's Pleasures Quote by Sandra Bernhard

Bernhard isn’t confessing fragility here; she’s staking out control. “I really have a problem” lands like the opening of a scandal story, but she flips the expectation: the “problem” isn’t addiction in the tabloid sense, it’s intolerance for the whole drug romance. In an entertainment culture that often treats substances as shorthand for edge, authenticity, or artistic depth, her bluntness reads like a refusal to perform the “messy genius” archetype.

The phrasing matters. “Any kind of drug” is deliberately sweeping, flattening distinctions people use to negotiate their own habits. That breadth signals a boundary, not a nuanced policy statement. Then she doubles down with “I always have,” a small clause that does big work: it positions her stance as stable, longstanding, almost innate. She’s not reformed; she’s not confessing a past she’s outgrown. She’s saying: this has never been my lane, stop trying to write me into that script.

Coming from Bernhard, whose persona has often been confrontational, glam, and transgressive, the line carries extra bite. She can traffic in provocation without needing chemical transgression as proof. The subtext is self-authorship: you don’t get to explain my boldness as intoxication, or reduce my career to survival narrative. It’s a low-key cultural critique of how show business packages women’s risk-taking as pathology, and how sobriety can be treated as a lack of mystique rather than a choice.