David Walliams
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Table of Contents
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About the Spalding Gray
Spalding Graywas an American actor, novelist, playwright, screenwriter and performance artist. He is best known for the autobiographical monologues that he wrote and performed for the theater in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as for his film adaptations of these works, beginning in 1987. He wrote and starred in several, working with different directors.
Theater critics John Willis and Ben Hodges called Gray’s monologues “trenchant, personal narratives delivered on sparse, unadorned sets with a dry, WASP, quiet mania.”: 316 Gray achieved renown for his monologue Swimming to Cambodia, which he adapted as a 1987 film in which he starred; it was directed by Jonathan Demme. Other of his monologues that he adapted for film were Monster in a Box (1991), directed by Nick Broomfield, and Gray’s Anatomy (1996), directed by Steven Soderbergh.
Gray died by suicide at the age of 62 after jumping into New York Harbor on January 11, 2004. He had been struggling with depression and severe injuries following a car accident. Soderbergh made a documentary film about Gray’s life, And Everything Is Going Fine (2010). An unfinished monologue and a selection from his journals were published in 2005 and 2011, respectively.
Frequently Asked Questions
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- 1.
I think of New York as a puree and the rest of the United States as vegetable soup.
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- 2.
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.
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- 3.
If I can make people laugh it’s like being a good lover.
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- 4.
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 .
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- 5.
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.
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- 6.
I understood once I held a baby in my arms, why some people have the need to keep having them.
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- 7.
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.
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- 8.
Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.
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- 9.
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.
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- 10.
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.
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