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Going from zero to a hundred on the American fame-o-meter, I take it, was a bit harrowing.

I was twenty-six or twenty-seven, and then, bang, there’s all this money, and there are magazine covers. Between the drugs and the women and all that stuff, it’s all coming at you, and you’re swallowed whole. It’s like “Whoooaaa!” Even Gandhi would have been kind of hard-pressed to handle it well. [As Gandhi on cocaine] “Just one line, if you pleeeze. I’ll just do a little and save the world—fuck India!”

Talking about your marriage five years ago, Valerie said, “If I had said, ‘Don’t cross this line,’ he would have been long gone.” In retrospect, was she too tolerant of your indulgences?

Maybe. I don’t think I would have been long gone. I think I was crying out for someone to say, “Enough.” In the end I had to make my own line. Anybody who finally kicks himself in the ass and wants to clean up makes his own line. You realize the final line is the edge.

Is the failure of your marriage a great disappointment to you?

It’s not disappointing. That’s why therapy helps a lot. It forces you to look at your life and figure out what’s functioning and what isn’t. You don’t have to beat your brains against a wall if it’s not working. That’s why you choose to be separated rather than to call each other an asshole every day. Ultimately, things went astray. We changed, and then with me wandering off again a little bit, then coming back and saying, “Wait, I need help”—it just got terribly painful.

Would you admit you’re tough to live with, even cleaned up?

Oh, God, yes. I’m no great shakes. It’s the “love me” syndrome combined with the “fuck you” syndrome. Like the great joke about the woman who comes up to the comic after a show and says, “God, I really love what you do. I want to fuck your brains out!” And the comic says, “Did you see the first show or the second show?” One hand is reaching out and the other is motioning to get back.

Couldn’t you have gotten therapy sooner and circumvented a lot of trouble? Were you afraid of it?

A little bit. My mother is a Christian Scientist, whose tenets maintain that you can always heal yourself. So I said, “Well, I’ll fix myself.” But there are certain things you can’t fix in yourself. You can get yourself healthy. I kicked drugs alone—I never went to a hospital.

You may be the only celebrity who beat dependency without the benefit of the Betty Ford clinic. What’s your secret?

With alcohol it was decompression. The same way I started drinking, I stopped. You work your way down the ladder from Jack Daniel’s to mixed drinks to wine to wine coolers and finally to Perrier. With cocaine, there is no way to gently decompress yourself. It took a few months. Someone said you finally realize you’ve kicked cocaine when you no longer talk about it. Then it’s gone. It’s like pulling away and seeing Pittsburgh from the air. People come up to you with twitching Howdy Doody jaws, and you think, “Hmmm, I looked like that.” You realize that if you saw by daylight the people you’d been hanging out with at night, they’d scare the shit out of you. There are bugs that look better than that.

How much money do you think you ultimately spent supporting your drug habit?

The weird thing about the drug habit was that I didn’t have to pay for it very often. Most people give you cocaine when you’re famous. It gives them a certain control over you; you’re at least socially indebted to them. And it’s also the old thing of perfect advertising. They can claim, “I got Robin Williams fucked up.” “You did? Lemme buy a gram, then.” The more fucked up you get, the more they can work you around. You’re being led around by your nostril. I went to one doctor and asked, “Do I have a cocaine problem?” He said, “How much do you do?” I said, “Two grams a day.” He said, “No, you don’t have a problem.” I said, “Okay.”

A few years ago, you ended one of your cable shows with a vignette about Albert Einstein. You quoted him,