Quotes by Spalding Gray

About Spalding Gray:

Spalding Rockwell Gray is known for the autobiographical monologues that he wrote and performed for the theater in the 1980s and 1990s.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

All the beautiful waitresses existed like eternal responsibilities.

Spalding Gray

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.

Spalding Gray

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

Spalding Gray

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

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

Spalding Gray

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

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...

Spalding Gray

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 ...

Spalding Gray

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

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

Spalding Gray

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

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

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

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

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

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...

Spalding Gray

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

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

Spalding Gray

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

Author Bio

  • NameSpalding Gray
  • DescriptionActor, dramatist, playwright, screenwriter
  • BornJune 5, 1941
  • DiedJanuary 11, 2004
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionActor; Novelist; Autobiographer; Screenwriter; Writer
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; National Book Award