Spalding Gray Quotes (14 Quotes)

NEW YORK (CNN) -- In his monologue Swimming to Cambodia, ... Thailand, the Pure Land.

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

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. It's one of the few living cities where people are living in the city that they work in. You know, that's amazing in itself.

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.

The greatest thing that happens to me when I'm skiing is the harmony. The only time I was ever present in my body before was in sex, performing, drugs and with the sea. Skiing became the new and healthy way of being present - although I don't know if it's healthy, I could sever my spinal cord.

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.

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 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.

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.

Recuperating in an Irish hospital, he is, characteristically, surrounded not by sterility but by eccentricity a transvestite with green fingernails offering toast and tea, followed by a survey-taker. ( Do I want the hospital to be smoke-free ... Because the only sin is hurting someone, and I've never hurt anyone, so I'm not afraid.

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

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 .

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

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.