Marc Maron > Quotes

“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?”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“I look at every book as a self-help book.”
― Marc Maron

“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?”
― Marc Maron

“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.”
― Marc Maron

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“It's easy to maintain your integrity when no one is offering to buy it out.”
― Marc Maron

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“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.”
― Marc Maron, The Jerusalem Syndrome: My Life as a Reluctant Messiah

“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.”
― Marc Maron

“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.”
― Marc Maron

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“Faith in the face of disappointment is only enhanced by laughter in the face of pain.”
― Marc Maron, The Jerusalem Syndrome: My Life as a Reluctant Messiah

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“There's a fine line between cultural criticism and bitterness.”
― Marc Maron

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“When you actually meet the devil and he offers you a deal most artists eventually negotiate.”
― Marc Maron

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“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.”
― Marc Maron, The Jerusalem Syndrome: My Life as a Reluctant Messiah

“[...] 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.”
― Marc Maron

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“People don’t talk to each other about real things because they’re afraid of how they’ll be judged. Or”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

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

“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.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal