30 Most Intimate Celebrity Revelations in Marc Maron's New Book

Marc Maron’s new book is a running narrative of celebrities and comics talking about everything from childhood to sexuality to failure to addiction. Drawing from Maron’s many WTF podcast interviews, the book features these public figures as you rarely if ever hear them: strikingly personal, surprisingly open, and profoundly emotional. From Barack Obama to Robin Williams, we rounded up 30 of the most intimate celebrity quotes featured in the book. 

“When I saw [Philip Seymour Hoffman] for the first time in Scent of a Woman I just knew what true love was. I knew what love at first sight was and it was the strangest feeling, sitting in a movie theater thinking, he’s for me and I’m for him and that was it. Strange. Believe me, when I was a kid, just like 8, 9 years old, I always thought I’d have Cary Grant in my movie or Harrison Ford. But something happened when I saw him.”

“I get lost in fantasy a lot … I would hope that I had a place where I didn’t get lost in it, but the fantasy of this person. This is something that’s happened to me a million times. I have a problem with intimacy where all of a sudden there’s a real person there. I’m trying to fix this. I’m trying to get better at this, but something happens in me where it’s almost like amnesia. It’s almost like waking up and going, Where am I? Who is this person? Why is this person looking me directly in the eye and having a conversation?”

“I had Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome where I had dark thoughts of things like unwanted sexual violence. It sort of started when I was about 9 or 10 years old. That’s a real syndrome. It is a real type of OCD. A lot of people have it.”

“I birthed at home. It was very important to me. I would do it again, even though if you asked right after, I’d be like ‘F— you.’ It’s just a massacre.”

“My father was murdered when I was 4 … He was a New York City cab driver, and he took a fare up to Harlem, and then they robbed him and shot him … Once he was shot, he died instantly, and then his foot was on the gas, and the car went across the median and crashed into some cars. Then there were some witness accounts and stuff like that. It was really amazing. Then, at the end of it all, there is the guy. They caught the guy and I had his whole rap sheet. It was weird to just see that, and to just get a fuller picture of that guy. He lives in Brooklyn. There’s a whole kind of weirdness of, ‘Oh, wow, this person, I’ve seen his whole life. I see his rap sheet’ … Weirdly enough, he was doing time in North Carolina at the same time I was in college in North Carolina. It’s just strange, these little sorts of intersections of life…”

“I have this scene in my head that, with my father, where actually, on weekends he was supposed to come pick me up, and I would sit on that porch, and he would never show up. Well, let me tell you this: That scenario in my head is a benchmark. I had inevitably looked for situations to strengthen my identity as the little boy who was left behind because on some level, that identity is what drove me buggy.”

“I’ve always been pretty bisexual. Sometimes it depends on the girl. I usually like really butch women and also women who are very dominant, and also women who are transitioning to male bodies. When I go through kind of a gay phase, when I’m really into women or there’s this one girl that I’m just crazy about, but she doesn’t live here. When we’re together, and I feel so powerful, like I don’t need men. We don’t need men at all. It feels really good. When you can go into a universe where you just need women, that’s just unbelievable. That sort of proves I’m not gay, because I have so much invested in patriarchy. Being with a woman is a beautiful vacation from patriarchy.”

“Kids are supposed to cry when they are born, but [my daughter] seemed very angry to me, and upset. You know when a kid’s crying in a delivery room, everybody is smiling. ‘Aw, look at her cry.’ But I was really upset for her. They put her on this little table, and they’re putting stuff around her … Sorry … I’m unexpectedly emotional. It’s not a story I tell a lot … Yeah, they put her on this little table, and they were f—ing jabbing shit into her, and they’re just rough with her, and she’s screaming. It was a C-section, so her mom is being sewn up. Her mom was just taken away.”

“I’ve never sought out my father. Absolutely not. He lives in New York. I’m sure I pass by, I don’t know where he is, but I’m sure I’ve ridden my bike past his place. My last interaction with him I was 19. It was on the phone.”

“I’ve dealt with depression and it became very serious after I stopped drinking and doing drugs. About a year into sobriety I had my first experience with super unipolar suicidal depression.”

“I got all the dark stuff of dating a comic minus the pleasure of dating somebody funny … I’m describing a chain of people and situations that I put myself through. They were painful and they took a good four years off of the evolution and health of my self-esteem and they seemed like these cool explorations of a life that I had never known and in reality, they were super damaging.”

“What’s bottom? Eating until I can’t stop throwing up. Not that I’m making myself throw up. Eating a box of Little Debbie cakes and the same night having a half-gallon of ice cream and maybe a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and three or four Pop Tarts. I used to go to the 7-Eleven by Wrigley Field, buy a bunch of crap, and sit on the hood of my car by the left field wall and just down it. No joy.”

“I’m sure [Drew Barrymore] has a completely different opinion about why [our marriage] went wrong. We don’t really have any relationship anymore. I haven’t talked to her in probably seven or eight years. We were living together, we were married. When she left the house that day, when we decided to get a divorce, I have never seen her since.”

“I’ve been sober much longer than I ever drank alcohol. It’s very difficult for me to define my life by that one thing. That I’m still an alcoholic is beyond doubt, but that doesn’t mean to say that alcohol is a problem in my life, because it’s not. It f—ing could be in a heartbeat, but it’s not right now.”

“Whenever I’m going back to therapy I’m going because I’m in danger of f—ing up with somebody that deserves better. I shut down. It’s all negative space. It’s all ‘what’s not there.’ I don’t do anything bad. I never cheat, I don’t even flirt. I don’t compete. I also don’t make a lot of eye contact. I go into a domestic kind of cocoon. Stop having sex, I stop taking showers, I focus on my work.”

“Divorce was so hard. But over the years, things happen. People grow apart. You know, he’s not here to talk about it, and to tell his side of the story, but I will say that for me, the hardest thing was knowing that it was the right thing to do. The thought of leaving was hideous and awful, but the thought of staying was worse.”

“I got a scholarship to Colorado State at Fort Collins, which is not only the very whitest town, it’s the very purest … I didn’t know that I was going to be the only black girl on the team. I walked in and I don’t know how this is going to work out because I’m very militant, too, so I’m very outspoken. When I walked into basketball practice, I walked in with a radio, so I’m the stereotype. Some of them girls had never even met a black person before. It was an adjustment for me and I was very lonely … I had my mattress in the living room because this was so new to me … I didn’t want to sleep in the room. There was nobody in the apartment with me. I was f—ing alone and I’m scared. I’m a kid. I was like 18.

“My mother had a lot of eating issues growing up, and that’s a tough thing to be around … I weigh a lot more than I used to because I don’t think about food all the time. I used to be very skinny, but you would never know because I hated my body and walked around in big clothes. What’s the point? You can never escape it. You’re with yourself all the time. And also, you have to eat. It’s the most inescapable thing to have an issue with. I was bulimic for 10 years.”

“I made the decision that the best way to get rid of my heroin problem was through crack. I spent so many years being like, I hate myself and I want to die, that like, I’m going to f—ing die, I might as well live a little. I just did so much of that thinking that I’m just relieved now.”

“When I started out being sexually active it was actually against the law to have sex. I have friends who were put in prison. Scars you for life, knowing that’s a possibility. Then you restrict yourself and you see other people doing the same thing and you think this is the way that life is. You buy into the lie that homosexuality is unnatural. It’s living in a closet. It’s living in a place that’s dark and dusty, with old things that aren’t used anymore. You certainly don’t like yourself, nor do you like society that makes you like that. Once you stop all that, the relief. The joy. Proud to be gay? No, proud to say I’m gay … I can now cry onstage. I could never cry before. It was fake. My acting was fake. My acting was disguise. Now my acting is about revelation, truth. Everything’s better. I can’t stop talking and telling people, ‘Come out. Join the human race.’”

“I was 18 when I moved here. Most of my formative years were in Pakistan. I came alone. I was 18 … I left Karachi, and I landed in Des Moines, Iowa. It’s very flat. I loved Iowa. It was great for me because if I’m going from Karachi to New York, nobody is going to give a shit about me, another Pakistani in New York. If you go to Iowa, there’s not that many people around … The weird thing was there was so much liberal white guilt that people didn’t want to acknowledge race at all. It was almost like people would go out of their way to not ask me about Pakistan.”

“My mother was the biggest influence in my life and this wonderful woman, but I am raised without a dad … I’m trying to figure out how I’m seen and viewed and understood as a black man in America. What does that mean? I’m absorbing all kinds of stereotypes and ideas from society. Like Richard Pryor or Shaft. I’m trying on a whole bunch of outfits. Here’s how I should act. Here’s what it means to be cool. Here’s what it means to be manly. You know, you start smoking. You start drinking coffee. You’ve got a leather jacket.”

On body image issues: “I’ve been accused over the years of, ‘You’re self-deprecating and that’s your act.’ You know what? It really comes from finding myself very flawed. I think that’s at the root of Catholicism. We’re all just flawed. There’s nothing we can do about it. I grew up just having a very dark self-view.”

“I had a pretty serious anxiety issue and when I was 20 I had a stroke. At the time, my doctors thought it was because of the birth control pill. That has since been negated, and it boils down to migraine-related stress issues.”

“My mom leaves my dad. Has an affair with my best friend’s dad. Breaks up their family. I’m in school. We’re trying to still be best friends. Like, we were best friends. It was crazy … She was Hester Prynne. I was like, ‘I love my mom. She’s my family, so f— you guys.’ Then years later, I was like, ‘Mom, how could you do that?’”

“If Me Five Years Ago saw Me Now, I would be unrecognizable. I was drinking quite a bit. I got to the point where I felt like I was going to collapse under the weight of it. I felt very trapped. I felt isolated. I also would very simply wake up in the morning and say, ‘I am not going to drink today,’ and by midday I was drinking. It was not a party in any way.”

“My dad raised two kids by himself. My mom died when I was 4 and a half, so it was hard on him. He was a single dad let with a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old. My little sister Katy was also killed in that car accident, and he was driving … I think when you’re that little you feel like you must have done something wrong to make them leave. You’re too self-centered, so you think you must have done something wrong.”

“The ultimate realization when you have kids is when you think, ‘Okay, now I’m going to have my kids and I’m gonna right all the wrongs.’ Then you just realize how hard it is to be a parent, and I’ve made so many mistakes. Different mistakes than my parents made. Some the same, but I’m trying not to.”

“I can’t believe this is my life. Me, married to this beautiful white French woman, and I have two blond-haired, blue-eyed kids … I wake up in the middle of the night — this is one of the scariest things ever. The kids are five, the twins. It’s one of the scariest things ever to wake up in the middle of the night and see two little white kids standing at the edge of your bed. It’s some creepy sh–. It’s just creepy.”

“I only drove drunk, that I remember, once. One time. I woke up the next morning asking, ‘Where’s my car?’ It turned out that the bartender had driven me home. He was a sweet guy and he drove me home. The next day, I couldn’t find the car. I thought oh my God, my car’s been stolen. Actually, no. They parked it for me in a safe parking lot. It’s nice when people take care of you when you’re that loaded.”