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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Read quote

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.

Read quote

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.

Read quote

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.

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The demand for standup in the eighties was created by how easy it was to exploit 'comedians' and create very cheap television programming.

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Hopefully standup will become special again.

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I think that standup has always been an acquired taste and there was always only a handful of performers that were really inspired.

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It may have lost its special-ness forever and the clubs might not being doing well but I think standup is in the best shape it has been in a long time.

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Surveillance induced morality: relics of cultural retardation.

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The development of the comedy club industry destroyed the uniqueness and intimacy of the profession but it also created jobs for comics and bred some great performers.

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Jerusalem Syndrome is actually a rare psychological condition that occurs to some visitors to the Middle East. They get to Israel and just snap.

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I'm sad to see the passing of the great drug warriors. I certainly did my part in that battle and I don't regret any of it.

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The bile makes it better. I am an information wasting machine - 100s of words a day.

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I was also a big Woody Allen fan. When I got into college I listened to Lenny Bruce but it's taken me years to put him into context historically and really get what he did.

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When I was a young kid I loved Don Rickles, Buddy Hackett and Jackie Vernon.

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Marc Maron

Books by Marc Maron

Quotes by Marc Maron