Neil Strauss Quotes

I grew up in a house of no love or emotion - it kind of sticks with you.

You initially become funny as a kid because you're looking for attention and love. Psychologists think that's all to do with mother abandonment. I think John Cleese has his depressions, and Terry Gilliam's the same. All of us together make one completely insane person.

I can see how child stars can be thrown off-kilter.

To enjoy being famous, you need to have a screw loose.

There's an incredible amount of loneliness that comes with child stardom because you're isolated from your society.

I can't get into the underlying psyche of someone like Robin Williams, but he was at that level of fame where he was somewhat self-protective.

Not everybody loves their children. If that was a fact, all the children would be happy and they would make happy adults. Instead, we have lots of miserable children that later became miserable adults. This is a fact. We cannot change that.

If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative.

Lack of love from parents often motivates their children to go searching for love in other relationships. This search is often misguided and leads to further disappointment.

I get the celebrity game now - you can go from being hot to fighting to be seen.

I remember my childhood as a horrible time. My mother says that nothing so horrible ever happened to me as the things that I remember.

I became very famous, as a teenager, and my name and photo were splashed in all the media. They made me larger than life, so I wanted to live larger than life, and the only way to do that was to be intoxicated.

I never had any childhood, for the word means sunshine and freedom from care. I had a starved and pinched little childhood, as far as love and merriment go.

Some people are very good at being 'stars' and it suits them. I'm grudging about it and I find it annoying.

So many stars lose their way, and with success become more neurotic, not less so.

Fame made me develop a panic disorder.

I have so much empathy for these young actors that are 19 and all of a sudden they're beautiful and famous and rich. I'm like, 'Oh my God, I'd be dead.'

I lost my childhood. I didn't play football or video games. Or have birthdays or the love of a family.

There was no demonstration of love I could read as a little boy.

There's a weird cloud around you when you're recognizable. It was a brief window for me. I think you have to have a pathological need for attention of any type, negative or positive, to thrive in that kind of situation. And I only want compliments.

There's probably no experience more alienating than fame, other than a terminal illness, where you actually find yourself in a situation that nobody around you can relate to.

I look at other people my age in this industry, other famous people my age, and they've just got famous friends. Which is cool, but I love being normal and just chilling at mine.

Not many child stars make it out of Hollywood alive or sane, and at any given time there are at least three former ones having very public breakdowns.

In Jenny Offill's remarkable first novel, 'Last Things,' 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her.

I continually acted up to get attention. My father gave me that, and once he left, I felt that I didn't have any.