Spalding Gray
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"Spalding Rockwell Gray" was an American actor and writer. He is known for the autobiographical One-person show/monologues that he wrote and performed for the theater in the 1980s and 1990s.

Theater critics John A. Willis/John Willis and Ben Hodges described his monologue work as "trenchant, personal narratives delivered on sparse, unadorned sets with a dry, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant/WASP, quiet mania". Gray achieved celebrity status for his monologue Swimming to Cambodia, which was adapted into a film in 1987 by filmmaker Jonathan Demme. Other one-man shows by Gray that were captured on film include Monster in a Box, directed by Nick Broomfield, and Gray's Anatomy (film)/Gray's Anatomy, directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Gray died in New York City, New York, of an apparent suicide in 2004. Steven Soderbergh made a 2010 documentary film about Gray's life entitled And Everything Is Going Fine.

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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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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.

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

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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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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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Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.

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

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