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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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Wallace Shawn
Age: 80
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
Looks
Asks
Objectively
Like
Audience
Examine
World
Opportunity
Presents
People
Littles
React
Look
Measure
Little
Oneself
Play
Group
Enclosed
Self
Groups
Assess
More quotes by Wallace Shawn
The actor's role in the community is quite unlike anyone else's. Businessmen, for example, don't take their clothes off or cry in front of strangers in the course of their work. Actors do.
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 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
Sleep: a poor substitute for caffeine!
Wallace Shawn
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
I grew up in a very polite family, and I suppose my parents were both very polite, and from the time I was a young boy, I suspected that there were passions seething underneath and not being mentioned, and that was something that came to preoccupy me. Somehow I had some drive to write down what people might really be thinking.
Wallace Shawn
For some reason, people find me funny. It's quite hard to define why a thought is funny. It's even harder to define why a person would be funny. It's a word that I can't define at all. But whether I know quite what it is or not, I seem to be it.
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
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
Who says one instance of writing has anything in common with another instance?
Wallace Shawn
As writers, we can't predict who might come along who might find our offerings valuable.
Wallace Shawn
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.
Wallace Shawn
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
In real life, every person is the leading man or woman. We don't think of ourselves as supporting or character actors.
Wallace Shawn
I don't have a television, and I'm just not too up on television.
Wallace Shawn
I never planned to be an actor. It turned out I could make a living doing it.
Wallace Shawn
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
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
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
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
