Spalding Gray Quotations

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.

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

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

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 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'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 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.

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