Spalding Gray Quotes

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

Spalding Gray

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Quotes to Explore

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

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Stuck

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

  

  Spalding Gray
  • People
  • Baby
  • Needs

• 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.

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Pain
  • Girlfriend
  • Teenage

• 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...

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Country
  • Home
  • Travel

• 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.

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Move
  • Embrace
  • Moved

• 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.

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Mother
  • Waiting
  • Suicide

• 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.

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Sleep
  • Class
  • Climbing

• 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.

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Children
  • Mistake
  • Wall

• 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 .

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Moving
  • Travel

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

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Christ
  • Nervous
  • Coming

• 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.

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Performance
  • Performing
  • Worked

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

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Allowed
  • Extent
  • Limiting

• 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.

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Life
  • Stories
  • Behind

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

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Real
  • Freak
  • Likes

• 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.'

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Home
  • Relax
  • Garbage

• 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.

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Sex
  • Might
  • Skiing

• 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.

  

  Spalding Gray
  • League
  • Raised
  • Ended

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

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Doubt

• 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.

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Looks
  • Jew
  • Cast

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

  

  Spalding Gray
  • People
  • Stranger

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

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Moving
  • Camels
  • Psychosis

• 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.

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Pleasure
  • Stay
  • Decipher

• 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.

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Thinking
  • Faces

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

  

  Spalding Gray
  • Believe
  • Travel
  • Pilots