Words matter. These are the best Spalding Gray Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If I can make people laugh it’s like being a good lover.
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.
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.
I think of New York as a puree and the rest of the United States as vegetable soup.
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.
Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.
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’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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.