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And my singing, I don't think I could sing Wagner or opera, but I could probably carry a tune. I was in a musical once, but it was never performed.

Wallace Shawn

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Wallace Shawn
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: November 12
Actor
Author
Character Actor
Film Actor
Playwright
Screenwriter
Television Actor
Voice Actor
Writer
New York City
New York
Wallace Michael Shawn
Wally Shawn
Sing
Musical
Singing
Wagner
Probably
Performed
Never
Tune
Think
Tunes
Thinking
Opera
Carry

More quotes by Wallace Shawn

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Acting is trying to be absolutely truthful to get audiences to believe that you are a dean, when, actually, not only are you not the dean, but if you walked into the building they'd probably throw you out. That's very hard.
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My personal life is lived as 'me,' but my professional life is lived as other people. In other words, when I go to the office, I lie down, dream, and become 'someone else.' That's my job.
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I wrote my first play at the age of 10, 55 years ago, and I've always found it a fantastic relief to imagine I know what things would be like from the point of view of other individuals and to send out signals from where I actually am not. Playwrights never need to write from the place where they are.
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'The Princess Bride' is by far the most popular film I've ever done. I don't think I'll ever top it.
Wallace Shawn
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I know that I am one and I've made a living as an actor and I enjoy being an actor, but when I'm not actually doing it, I forget that I do it.
Wallace Shawn
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From being a writer of plays, it was not that surprising that somebody thought of giving me a job as an actor. After I played one part, others came along.
Wallace Shawn
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I sincerely believe that if Bush and Cheney recognized the full humanity of other people's mothers around the world, they wouldn't commit the crimes they commit.
Wallace Shawn
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I grew up. I began to think the United States had some problems that really required the help of artistic people to solve. And I gave myself permission to be a writer instead of a civil servant.
Wallace Shawn
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I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing.
Wallace Shawn
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It's obviously a characteristic of human beings that we like to feel superior to others, but our problem is we are not superior
Wallace Shawn
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You know, I haven't written as much as most other writers. Certainly maybe those who keep a more regular schedule accomplish more.
Wallace Shawn
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Interestingly, the actress who, in her own persona, may be gentle, shy, and socially awkward, someone whose hand trembles when pouring a cup of tea for a visiting friend, can convincingly portray an elegant, cruel aristocrat tossing off malicious epigrams in an eighteenth-century chocolate house.
Wallace Shawn
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I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing. I feel the actors are being put through a kind of nightmarish labor. They're like animals being forced to pull heavy carts of vegetables at incredible speeds.
Wallace Shawn
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A play presents a self-enclosed little world for the audience to examine. It's an opportunity to look objectively at a group of people, to assess them, to react to them, and to measure oneself against them, to ask 'Am I like that?'
Wallace Shawn
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The life of an actor can be very enviable.
Wallace Shawn
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My plays have been strange from the beginning, and they never got unstrange.
Wallace Shawn
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You're always fighting the contradiction between the supposed intimacy of a two-person conversation and the blunt reality that you're trying to sell the play to people who are sitting maybe too far away from you.
Wallace Shawn
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I think I'm trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. It's not the way people talk in life at all.
Wallace Shawn
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I was making my living from a joke about my appearance that I didn't understand, and in a way still don't, because when I look in a mirror it doesn't seem funny to me.
Wallace Shawn
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I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write.
Wallace Shawn