More on Spalding.

Your endorsement of my importance provided me with strength that carried me through many trials that I might not have survived, so it proves that small acts of kindness reverberate in ways that we cannot predict, and that if we have the opportunity to be generous with our hearts, ourselves, we have no idea of the depth and breadth of love's reach.... My friend... gave me one of your books, Sex and Death To The Age Fourteen with the inscription, "M - This book is why I am still alive. Love, C." I wish that you had a book like that.

- Margaret Cho.

His loss is felt more deeply than the loss of many other actors might be, I think, for this reason - we all "knew" him.

- Craig Phillips.

"And so" is the kind of phrase he used a lot, because it allowed him to go anywhere he wanted in his monologues. It allowed him to weave a story around the story he found impossible to tell, the one without language that led him to take his own life.

- Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times.

His distinctive achievement, observed Simon Prosser in The Sunday Telegraph in 1993, was "the reworking of his own life as a tragi-comic road movie in which he stars as a perpetual innocent abroad, revealing elemental truths in spite of himself and evoking situations in which almost anyone can imagine finding themselves". He was, Prosser added, too funny for the avant-garde, too quirky for the mainstream.

- The Telegraph.

What all his work shared was an air of comic desperation, the amusement and fear that the knowledge that life is absurd can foster.

- Bruce Weber in the NYT.

And though he embodied the stereotype of the self-absorbed New Yorker - looking at the world through the lens of one who had known intensive psychotherapy, fad diets and mind-expanding drugs - his pursuit of a story had a degree of selflessness that often put the amiable, all-too-accessible Gray in harm's way.

- David Patrick Stearns in the Guardian.

Posted by dwhudson at March 10, 2004 11:53 AM