Marc Maron Quotes

Everyone is a little bitter. We're born bitter. The personality itself is really just a very complex defense mechanism. A reaction to the first time someone said, "No you can't.

It amazes me that we are all on Twitter and Facebook. By "we" I mean adults. We're adults, right? But emotionally we're a culture of seven-year-olds. Have you ever had that moment when are you updating your status and you realize that every status update is just a variation on a single request: "Would someone please acknowledge me?

The Internet was born into a world where many people had already lost their sense of connection to each other. The collapse had already been taking place for decades by then. The web arrived offering them a kind of parody of what they were losing—Facebook friends in place of neighbors, video games in place of meaningful work, status updates in place of status in the world. The comedian Marc Maron once wrote that “every status update is a just a variation on a single request: ‘Would someone please acknowledge me?

Have you ever had one of those moments when you look up and realize that you're one of those people you see on the train talking to themselves?

I look at every book as a self-help book.

I was an abusive, selfish, needy, angry asshole. Now I'm just kind of selfish, a little less angry, occasionally needy, with flights of asshole. I've grown.

If you can't afford the good food or if you can't afford health care or if you don't have a job or if your car is dangerous because you can't get it fixed and you DIE, you just lost the game-bzzzzz-thanks for playing extreme capitalism.

It's easy to maintain your integrity when no one is offering to buy it out.

There's something to be said that if everyone likes something there's gotta be something fucking wrong with it on some level. Unless it's ice cream.

That’s the big challenge of life—to chisel disappointment into wisdom so people respect you and you don’t annoy your friends with your whining.

When you're young you really think you're angry for reasons and causes. As you get older, you realize you might just be angry.

The truth is, I can’t read anything with any distance. Every book is a self-help book to me. Just having them makes me feel better.

That's an animal fable about humility. If you survive your mistake, you must learn from it. Accept that you're fragile, vulnerable, and sometimes stupid. Realize that you're not immortal and you've got to take care of yourself. And then laugh it off and fly away.

We're all carrying around some shit. When you hear the things people have gone through and realize you've gone through the same, it provides an amazing amount of relief. It give us hope. And I think that's what we're supposed to get from each other. The hope that, maybe, just maybe, we're going to be okay. Maybe.

There's a fine line between cultural criticism and bitterness.

Faith in the face of disappointment is only enhanced by laughter in the face of pain.

I’ve gotta stop thinking I know what other people think, cause most of ‘what other people think’ is something I’m making up. So I should just let them have their experience, I’ll have my experience and not pretend to know, and just get past that. [I think that] is a major obstacle: manifesting that insecurity, that fear. Believing the audience in your head as opposed to what’s really going on in the world—not responding to the one I’m making up, which is always going to judge me harder than the real one.

it can take twenty years to create an overnight success but what you don’t hear is that that is the exact same amount of time it takes to create a bitter failure.

Some people don’t even realize they’re bitter. If you don’t know whether you are or not, here’s a quick quiz you can give yourself. If you ever wake up in the morning and the first thing you say is “Oh, fuck, not again,” you might be a little bitter.

He doesn't have anything like wisdom of age or hindsight. He's a biased historian of self, an emotional revisionist. We all are, for the most part.

I was with her for about six years before I asked her to marry me, which only means one thing: I shouldn’t have done it! If you wait six years to get engaged, you are on the fence.

When you actually meet the devil and he offers you a deal most artists eventually negotiate.

I develop oddly deep emotional connections to people in my life that are one-sided. I may just be a passing character to them. I don't know what that is. I don't know why that is. I can have one encounter with somebody and feel very connected to them and read a lot into that. They become very important people to me, but to them I may just be like, "Oh yeah, we talked that one time, right?" To me it's a live-changing moment that bonded us; to them, it was a five-minute polite chat in passing.

Some of you may be perfectly happy with mediocrity. Some of you will get nothing but heartbreak. Some of you will be heralded as geniuses and become huge. Of course, all of you think that one describes you...hence the delusion necessary to push on.

[...] I'm about to get on a plane here, and I'm packing recovery literature. All I know is I'm going to be the guy reading the book on co-dependency. That's what I know about me.

People don’t talk to each other about real things because they’re afraid of how they’ll be judged. Or

If you don't like something it's okay to shut the fuck up about it and find something you do like.

In our interview, Conan said something about the secret of his success: “Get yourself in a situation where you have no choice.” And that’s what I’m doing, because I had no choice.

I don’t hoard, exactly, but I get it. It’s a response to our need and desire for purpose, order, definition, and a fortress. It’s a calling that requires constant management, control, and obsessive attention.

We all have the right to cherry-pick the advice given us in order to do exactly what we wanted to do in the first place.

I'm not for everyone. I'm barely for me.

Comedians in their infancy are generally selfish, irresponsible, emotionally retarded, morally dubious, substance-addicted animals who live out of boxes and milk crates. They are plagued with feelings of failure and fraudulence. They are prone to fleeting fits of manic grandiosity and are completely dependent on the acceptance and approval of rooms full of strangers, strangers the comedian resents until he feels sufficiently loved and embraced. Perhaps I am only speaking for myself here.

People who have babies tell me I will know a love that is beyond anything I can imagine, and a joy that is indescribable. Love and joy? That sounds horrifying. I have no way of knowing whether I can handle either of those. I'm much better with need and fear. They are what ground me.

Imagining the worst has always been a great comfort to me. If there is turbulence there is an imminent crash. If she doesn’t pick up the phone, she is fucking someone. If there is a lump it is a tumor. By thinking like this I protect myself from disappointment. And if anything other than the worst-case scenario unfolds, what a pleasant surprise!

The next evolutionary step is into the screen.

But then again, what do I know. I project. Then I judge.

I was thinking about how temporary disappointment can be if you don’t linger on it too long and how there are beautiful things in the world if you look. It’s up to you to find them for yourself.

The last day i was home i took the rental car up old 14 behind the Sandia Mountains. as i drove north toward Santa Fe past Madrid I rolled the window down halfway and let the cold, brisk, February air come into the car. I smelled the pinon trees and the damp earth. The Gray came over me. My life flashed through my heart in one deep rush of feeling. When I made the turn around the mountain to the west, the mesas and valleys spread out before me under the orange and gold horizon. The sun hit me like a wave that flooded out the past and dissolved any idea of the future, and I felt okay and whole for about twenty minutes.

Worse than the feeling of loss that comes with a breakup is the feeling of losing. Loss is a state of emotional injury that you can get past; losing is a feeling of humiliation and defeat that stays fresh. The latter causes most of the problems in the world. If there is another man involved, it is almost impossible not to judge yourself as a failure and see him as an enemy.

Notebooks. There are dozens of notebooks. I always carry notebooks with me. I scribble in them in a barely readable scrawl. I do not write jokes. I write moments. Thoughts. Fragments that I have to sweat over as if they’re cryptic texts in a lost language when I try to interpret them. That shouldn’t be part of my process—decoding my own writing—but it has been for my entire life. What does that say about me? Why can’t I make it easy? I need to complicate everything to protect myself from success and to remain complicated and overwhelmed.

I guess we can start at the end but it’s really the middle. Let’s just call it the really bad part. My second wife, Mishna, brought it to my attention that I had an anger problem. She didn’t say it like that. What she said was, “I’m leaving.” Then she took her vagina and left.

I am beginning to see how grief has transformed me, humbled me, opened me up, cut through the bullshit of my being. It’s not growth anyone wants to do. It’s growth that has been thrust upon us, ripped from us, has come from being punched in the soul and kicked in the heart. You have no choice.

My bullshit was that I adore you and I don't have fingers or eyes how to deal with it.

It’s amazing how much you can rationalize when you’re on drugs. I could actually say to myself, “Look, I’m only doing blow Wednesday through Saturday.

What you don’t know about your parents is what becomes fascinating as you get older. They

Get yourself in a situation where you have no choice.

There is a weird truth to the idea that if you really don’t care, things will generally go your way. If you’re really invested and emotionally attached, things will get away from you or at least get chaotic and scary.

She had that strange mutant beauty that models have. It’s the kind of beauty that no matter what they are wearing or how they try to hide themselves, a sharply defined, electric appeal comes through and zaps your desire.

I know compulsive napping sounds like a contradiction in terms but it is not. I also call them panic naps. A panic nap usually comes on with an exacerbated declaration of: “Fuck, I gotta … goddamnit … I can’t think about … shit, I’m tired.

Why am I holding on to this stuff? Some of this junk is losing its punch. Pictures. Pieces of paper with writing on them—I can no longer connect with the thoughts or feelings that birthed them, that drove me in that panicky desperate moment to scribble in a barely legible scrawl as if on a cave wall. All say the same thing in some form or another: “I am here. This is me in this moment.” Do I have some fantasy that this stuff will be important after I die? Do I think that scholars will be thrilled that I left such a disorganized treasure trove of creative evidence of me? Will the archives be fought over by college libraries? What will probably happen is my brother will come out with my mother and look in the boxes. My mother will hold up a VHS or a cassette and say to my brother, “Do I have a machine that plays these?” My brother will shake his head no and they will throw it all away.

Most of the books I have are indicators of my insecurity. I really wanted to be an intellectual. I really wanted to understand Sartre. I thought that was what made people smart. I have tried to read Being and Nothingness no fewer than twenty times in my life. I really thought that every answer had to be in that book. Maybe it is. The truth is, I can’t read anything with any distance. Every book is a self-help book to me. Just having them makes me feel better. I underline profusely but I don’t retain much. Reading is like a drug. When I am reading from these books it feels like I am thinking what is being read, and that gives me a rush. That is enough. I glean what I can. I finish some of the unfinished thoughts lingering around in my head by adding the thoughts of geniuses and I build from there. There are bookmarks in most of the denser tomes at around page 20 to 40 because that was where I said, “I get it.” Then I put them back on the shelf.

If you find yourself in conversation with someone you know and that person brings up someone you both know and before he says another word you mutter, “That guy’s a fucking asshole,” you might be a little bitter. If you find yourself dismissing universally acclaimed landmark achievements, saying, for example, “The Godfather is an okay movie,” you might be bitter.

People want to share but they usually don’t.
People don’t talk to each other about real things because they’re afraid of how they’ll be judged. Or they think other people don’t have the capacity to carry the burden of what they have to say. They see the compulsion to put that burden out in the world as a show of weakness. But all that stuff is what makes us human; more than that, it’s what makes being human interesting and funny. How we got away from that, I don’t know. But fuck that: We’re built to deal with shit. We’re built to deal with death, disease, failure, struggle, heartbreak, problems. It’s what separates us from the animals and why we envy and love animals so much. We’re aware of it all and have to process it. The way we each handle being human is where all the good stories, jokes, art, wisdom, revelations, and bullshit come from.

Before hoarding became a phenomenon, people just called it “collecting” or “being nostalgic.” I don’t hoard, exactly, but I get it. It’s a response to our need and desire for purpose, order, definition, and a fortress. It’s a calling that requires constant management, control, and obsessive attention. I am amassing artifacts from the history of me. My garage is the storeroom and temporary exhibition hall of the yet-to-be-built museum documenting the rise and fall of the Marc Age. I am the curator. I decide the meaning and worth of the collection based on my feelings in a moment.

When I was a kid watching comedians on TV and listening to their records they were the only ones that could make it all seem okay. They seemed to cut through the bullshit and disarm fears and horror by being clever and funny. I don't think I could have survived my childhood without watching stand-up comics. When I started doing comedy I didn't understand show business. I just wanted to be a comedian. Now, after twenty-five years of doing stand-up and the last two years of having long conversations with over two hundred comics I can honestly say they are some of the most thoughtful, philosophical, open-minded, sensitive, insightful, talented, self-centred, neurotic, compulsive, angry, fucked-up, sweet, creative people in the world.

I was driving home one afternoon during this period when I rolled past a woman putting household objects and furniture out in her front yard. I figured it was a garage sale or she was termite bombing. As I moved past her house an object I saw stopped me. Dragged me into the present. A chair. The chair? The orange Danish modern chair that I broke and that subsequently broke up my marriage appeared to be sitting on her front lawn. “Impossible,” I thought. That was destroyed, thrown out, gone. I stopped my car abruptly in the street, opened my car door, and ran up into her yard. She was pulling more stuff out of her house. I said, “Hi. Hey, are you selling this stuff?” “Just take whatever you want. I’m leaving,” she said, going angrily about her business. “Where did you get this chair? I used to have one exactly like it. I’ve never seen another one.” “I found it,” she said. “Take it.” I inspected the chair. It had been carefully rebuilt, put back together. It was the chair. “Did you find this on the street up on the hill around the corner?” “Yeah,” she said. “Why?” “This chair destroyed my marriage.” She looked at me with a dark, stressed gaze for a second like she was looking through me at something burning in the distance and said, “Mine, too.” I didn’t ask any questions. Synchronicity was upon us. The causality was there, it was explainable, but the meaning of the object before us was at once unique and shared. It was some kind of black magic that sent my thoughts back to the garage wizard who kept Jung’s curtains locked up. What had he unleashed on this world, my world, her world, with this chair? “We have to take it out of circulation.” “Yes,” she said, catatonically, like how I felt. Then this stranger and I proceeded to destroy the chair with our hands and our feet until it was unfixable. We took a breath and looked down at the scattered chair shards. “Thanks,” she said. A horn honked. I turned to see my car, door open, sitting in the middle of the street, running. Someone needed to get by. “Good luck with everything,” I said, then walked back to my car and drove away, strangely relieved. I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw her making a pile of culprit pieces.

Years ago I did a particularly angry set onstage. I talked about AIDS, the end of the world, and how silly and hopeless life was. A guy came up to me after the show and asked, “Why comedy?” That was all he said. I was dumbfounded.

I didn’t know what to do. I’m in love with this woman, I’m married to this other woman, and I’m in trouble, so I call my two friends. That’s all I need, two. I need the main guy and the guy I go to when I drain the main guy.

I know you’ve probably heard that in show business it can take twenty years to create an overnight success but what you don’t hear is that that is the exact same amount of time it takes to create a bitter failure.

was seated at the front of coach in an aisle seat, directly behind the first-class dividing wall and the flight attendant service area. It’s my favorite seat on a plane. I like watching people get on the plane so I can judge them. I like judging. I didn’t see any real problems among the passengers who awkwardly clumped onto the plane, but I definitely felt like I was in a better place than some of them, which helped take the edge off my mood. Judging works.

I graduated with honors, which was ridiculous. Charm goes a long way in the liberal arts.

It’s the irony or maybe the tragedy of being a fan that it’s not enough to let the music enter you like a drug or define and shape the world for you. You also want to somehow touch it and have it affirm you in more direct ways, whether you’re playing a riff like Chuck Berry or singing like Buddy Holly or buying Keith Richards’s guitar—or actually meeting your idols. In

People don’t talk to each other about real things because they’re afraid of how they’ll be judged.

I need to complicate everything to protect myself from success and to remain complicated and overwhelmed. I

I don’t know if I am romanticizing, mythologizing, or being nostalgic. I assume all three. That seems to be how the brain breaks things down after a certain age. I

My brain loves obsessions. If it can make me hate myself, then it’s all the better.

That is a metaphor for every adult relationship I’ve had. “Hey baby, we’re going down. Get in.” You

When you hear the things that people have gone through and realize you’ve gone through the same, it provides an amazing amount of relief. It gives us hope. And I think that’s what we’re supposed to get from each other. The

Have you ever had that moment when you are updating your status and you realize that every status update is just a variation on a single request: “Would someone please acknowledge me?

If you have a handlebar mustache, that is pretty much all you are. You are a delivery system for a handlebar mustache.

We’re really not that different from monkeys. What’s the difference? Pants? What’s the difference between grunting and “Oh, email.

I need to complicate everything to protect myself from success and to remain complicated and overwhelmed.

I think a lot of comedy comes from hypersensitivity, from being too vulnerable to deal with life and needing to preemptively protect yourself.

I always think about suicide because I find it relaxing.

I think the pastime of chatting or candidly talking to people about anything or nothing is fading away. People don't even want to leave voice messages anymore, let alone talk. We keep a distance from each other because we can. It's odd and sad. Because just by talking to each other, we can put all the aspects and challenges and joys and horrors of life into perspective, even if that is not what we are talking about. It's relieving, comforting, and enjoyable.

I expect relief and life-changing impact from everything.

I don't think white people think about their whiteness enough in this country. When the news says "White people blah blah blah," every white person says, "That's not me, I'm not White People." Whereas when then news says, "Black people blah blah blah," even if I don't relate to that, I know that's me. I have to accept some responsibility for that, or I have to choose not to, but I can't act like I'm not involved in it. - W. Kamau Bell

Earning the ability to shamelessly have the freedom to love and have sex with who you want and honor your desires is an inspiration.

Some people don’t even realize they’re bitter. If you don’t know whether you are or not, here’s a quick quiz you can give yourself. If you ever wake up in the morning and the first thing you say is “Oh, fuck, not again,” you might be a little bitter. If you find yourself in conversation with someone you know and that person brings up someone you both know and before he says another word you mutter, “That guy’s a fucking asshole,” you might be a little bitter. If you find yourself dismissing universally acclaimed landmark achievements, saying, for example, “The Godfather is an okay movie,” you might be bitter.

I did not scream, not yet. I had a series of odd thoughts as adrenaline blasted through my body. “Do I want to die to this song? It’s a good song but do I want to die to it? What song would be a good song to die to? I should make a death playlist for my iPod for when I have time to decide before I die what song I want to hear. I’m an older guy. I could be on a treadmill and feel a pain shooting down my arm. Better pick a tune, fast.

Righteous intolerance is no good. Democracy cannot exist without the lubricant of tolerance.

The comedian Marc Maron once wrote that “every status update is a just a variation on a single request: ‘Would someone please acknowledge me?

Every book is a self help book to me. Just having them makes me feel better...Reading is like a drug. When I am reading from these books it feels like I am thinking what is being read, and that gives me a rush. - Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

Every book is a self help book to me. Just having them makes me feel better...Reading is like a drug. When I am reading from these books it feels like I am thinking what is being read, and that gives me a rush.

There are some things you can't un-fuck.