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In real life, every person is the leading man or woman. We don't think of ourselves as supporting or character actors.

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
Every
Supporting
Men
Leading
Think
Actors
Thinking
Woman
Life
Character
Persons
Person
Real

More quotes by Wallace Shawn

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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
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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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I think the whole system of education would change if I were in charge and had the ability to make changes. I don't think I would keep Princeton exactly being Princeton.
Wallace Shawn
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I don't happen to have a sense of humor personally, so I don't know what's funny about a character... This happens to be a feature of my life generally.
Wallace Shawn
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I'm being mocked because I don't live up to a socially determined view of what other people think a person should look like.
Wallace Shawn
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After being in one movie, it didn't seem like that would be my life. I had done several jobs, briefly. I'd been a shipping clerk, I worked in a copy shop, I didn't think the acting was going to go on and on.
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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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
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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
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My style as a human being is to indulge people who need to escape, yet I insist on confronting them as a playwright. It's quite embarrassing, it's quite unpleasant, it's quite awkward.
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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I was clever enough to know that John Donne was offering something that was awfully enjoyable. I just wasn't clever enough to actually enjoy it.
Wallace Shawn
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In my early 20s, I studied history and politics, and I really thought that perhaps I would devote my life to that.
Wallace Shawn
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It is hard enough to make a plan for how you are going to spend an evening with somebody else. So to make a plan for how you are going to behave in 25 years seems based on a view of life that is incomprehensible to me.
Wallace Shawn
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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
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I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing.
Wallace Shawn
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When I was a child, I did always feel that people were hiding things, and that they weren't expressing their true feelings. When adults are too complicated, and cover their emotions with layers of well-intentioned subterfuge, the child isn't seeing reality clearly enough and gets upset.
Wallace Shawn
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For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence.
Wallace Shawn
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I have been vain since birth. I expected other people to like what I did, although my vanity has definitely diminished over the years.
Wallace Shawn
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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