'Admitting the Problem is Half the Battle'

Television is a mental illness. Wanting to be on television is a mental illness. Wanting to be president of the United States, wanting to be an actor—these are degrees of the same mental illness. If you need to be approved of simultaneously by more people than are in this room now, there’s a problem. I don’t know what would happen if television—or fame—stopped tomorrow for all the people who are pursuing it, what they would do. I suspect the idea of the zombie apocalypse is based on that…

I’m gonna eat your flesh unless you applaud me! And that’s the predicate here of my own self-analysis. But you find yourself at various times in your life being fearful, because you don’t know how to function in some environment in which you’re not being applauded by a thousand people or more at once. So many times I’ve looked back with a kind of sympathetic disgust at my personal conduct till age 40.

— Perpetually embattled talking head Keith Olbermann in GQ magazine, as spotted by Jim Treacher, who adds that Keith’s behavior since turning 40 “has been exemplary.”

If not his ratings.