He won’t fly on the Balinese airline, Garuda, because he won’t fly on any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation.
One of the ways to reincarnate is to tell your story.
I’m kind of this control freak that likes to create his own hells before the real one can get to him.
Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.
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.
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 .
The only thing I don’t doubt is my doubt.
I think of New York as a puree and the rest of the United States as vegetable soup.
Real life has always let me down. That’s why I do the monologues. I have always said I would rather tell a life than live a life. But I have to live a life in order to tell one.
I consulted a therapist at Mass. General. After about 20 minutes, he stopped me and said, ‘You’re just a big existential garbage pail. Go home and relax.’
How therapeutic it is to surround yourself with people stranger than yourself.
To be famous is to be stuck in an inflexible place. But at least it is to be stuck with money.
I understood once I held a baby in my arms, why some people have the need to keep having them.
If I can make people laugh it’s like being a good lover.
I refer to jet lag as ’jet-psychosis – there’s an old saying that the spirit cannot move faster than a camel.
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.
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.
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.
All the beautiful waitresses existed like eternal responsibilities.
Psychoanalysis is the transformation of hysterical misery into common unhappiness.