Spalding Gray Quotations

I think of my father and how confused he was by me. He understood my love for theater, and he understood that New York City was the only place that it was happening in America, really, in any live way.

I say that I can't make anything up. I think of myself as a collage artist. I'm cutting and pasting memories of my life. And I say, I have to live a life in order to tell a life. I would prefer to tell it because telling you're always in control, you're like God.

I may look like an American WASPy doctor or lawyer, but I feel just like Woody Allen. Don't cast me for my looks - I have a very ironic, existential, crazy Jew in me.

Skiing is better than sex actually, because for me a good round of sex might be seven minutes. Skiing you can do for seven hours.

Radio allowed me to be a creator, and TV stole that creation from me by literalizing - and to some extent limiting - my vision.

I was raised as an upper-class WASP in New England, and there was this old tradition there that everyone would simply be guided into the right way after Ivy League college and onward and upward. And it rejected me, I rejected it, and I ended up as a kind of refugee, really.

If I can make people laugh it's like being a good lover.

I'm the man who sits behind a table and tells true stories from his life. I'm also an actor. I was trained as an actor at Emerson College, and I use that training to play myself.

I fantasize about going back to high school with the knowledge I have now. I would shine. I would have a good time, I would have a girlfriend. I think that's where a lot of my pain comes from. I think I never had any teenage years to go back to.

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.

I understood once I held a baby in my arms, why some people have the need to keep having them.

The fact that New York continues in the face of all of the chaos, of the crime, of the madness, you just think that it would just pop and vanish, just explode.

I think of New York as a puree and the rest of the United States as vegetable soup.

I was darkly convinced that at age 52 I would kill myself because my mother committed suicide at that age. I was fantasizing that she was waiting for me on the other side of the grave.

I knew I couldn't live in America and I wasn't ready to move to Europe so I moved to an island off the coast of America - New York City .

I knew I couldn't live in America, and I wasn't ready to move to Europe, so I moved to an island off the coast of America - New York City... It was tolerant. It was a place that tolerated differences and could incorporate them and embrace them, which was what America was supposed to be about and wasn't.

What's so fascinating about New Yorkers is that each person has a whole lexicon of personal logic in the way that they decipher and do what has to be done to enjoy, stay alive, take pleasure in this place.

I'm basically a fearful person. I'm a phobic person.

When Mom had her first nervous breakdown, she said she had a vision of Christ coming to her in the living room.

When people used to ask me why I got involved with Hollywood films, I would say jokingly that it was for the health insurance.

When I first came to New York City in 1967, I joined up with Richard Schechner's Performance Group - where we worked in the Performing Garage in SoHo.

One of the ways to reincarnate is to tell your story.

I'm kind of this control freak that likes to create his own hells before the real one can get to him

When I was in therapy about two years ago, one day I noticed that I hadn't had any children. And I like children at a distance. I wondered if I'd like them up close. I wondered why I didn't have any. I wondered if it was a mistake, or if I'd done it on purpose, or what. And I noticed my therapist didn't have any children either. He had pictures of his cats on the wall. Framed.

Real life has always let me down. That's why I do the monologues. I have always said I would rather tell a life than live a life. But I have to live a life in order to tell one.

The only thing I don't doubt is my doubt.

I see [my pen] as an extension of my musculature. It's like being a painter. It's the closest I can get to my breath.

I consulted a therapist at Mass. General. After about 20 minutes, he stopped me and said, 'You're just a big existential garbage pail. Go home and relax.'

How theraputic it is to surrond yourself with people stranger than yourself.

To be famous is to be stuck in an inflexible place. But at least it is to be stuck with money.

I hadn't had a perfect moment yet. And it's very important for me to have perfect moments in exotic countries like that... it kind of lets you know when it's time to go home...

He won't fly on the Balinese airline, Garuda, because he won't fly on any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation.

All the beautiful waitresses existed like eternal responsibilities.

And just as I was climbing into that first-class seat, and wrapping myself in a blanket, just as I was adjusting my pillow behind my head, and having a sip of that champagne, and just as I was bringing down and adjusting my Thai purple sleep mask, I had an inkling. I had a flash. I suddenly thought I knew what it was that had killed Marilyn Monroe.

I refer to jet lag as 'jet-psychosis - there's an old saying that the spirit cannot move faster than a camel.