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I never planned to be an actor. It turned out I could make a living doing it.
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
Planned
Turned
Actor
Actors
Living
Make
Never
More quotes by Wallace Shawn
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
I started writing plays in around 1967, and at a certain point, I thought, 'I'm writing plays, I should learn about acting and what it is.' So I went to the HB Studio in New York, and I was there for about nine months.
Wallace Shawn
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
In terms of number of movies, I've been in an extraordinary amount. If you count only the minutes I'm onscreen, it's not so long.
Wallace Shawn
Even with my wife, I find sharing soup is hard.
Wallace Shawn
But because we've all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.
Wallace Shawn
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
I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing.
Wallace Shawn
I have an enormous appetite to see life as I know it presented in front of my eyes.
Wallace Shawn
There's nothing regular about my life at all, really. I don't keep a regular schedule and every day is different. It's all rather chaotic.
Wallace Shawn
I do things, and other people laugh at them. I rarely know what the joke is supposed to be or why they're laughing.
Wallace Shawn
Who says one instance of writing has anything in common with another instance?
Wallace Shawn
The Fever is a one-person play. I decided I would perform it myself, and I decided I would not perform it in theaters, because the character in the play says certain things that I meant.
Wallace Shawn
I see myself as a citizen of the planet. Even as a child, I always found it mindless to root for your own team. I was puzzled by the fact that people said their own team was better than other teams simply because it was theirs.
Wallace Shawn
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
I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write.
Wallace Shawn
My father was a jazz listener, and I think, at least before I was 5, I was not so into that. Although there were records that emphasized percussion that I liked, like Baby Dodds.
Wallace Shawn
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
If I had even the tiniest scrap of advice to give to a young actor who was figuring out how to audition, I would say don't memorize the script The reality about auditions is that 98 percent of the results has to do with what you are, not with what you did in the audition.
Wallace Shawn
We are not what we seem. We are more than what we seem. The actor knows that. And because the actor knows that hidden inside himself there's a wizard and a king, he also knows that when he's playing himself in his daily life, he's playing a part, he's performing, just as he's performing when he plays a part on stage.
Wallace Shawn
