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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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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
Stills
Jokes
Seems
Seem
Still
Funny
Look
Making
Looks
Understand
Joke
Way
Living
Mirror
Doesn
Mirrors
Didn
Appearance

More quotes by Wallace Shawn

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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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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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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
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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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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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Escape before it’s too late.
Wallace Shawn
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If my relation to each and every peasant in Cambodia is indeed exactly what the principles of morality would demand it to be, it's a miraculous coincidence, because it takes a lot of effort to behave correctly in regard to my friends, and from one end of the year to another I never give those peasants a single thought.
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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I have an enormous appetite to see life as I know it presented in front of my eyes.
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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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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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
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When I was first starting to write plays, I quite literally had never heard of the idea of studying playwriting. I wouldn't have studied it even if I had heard of it.
Wallace Shawn
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Sleep: a poor substitute for caffeine!
Wallace Shawn
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Children, I always think, are just putting on a performance of being naive and not understanding anything. I have worked with children in films, and they're treated as adults and they just drop the pretense of being children.
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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Even with my wife, I find sharing soup is hard.
Wallace Shawn
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In an amusement park, you can go on a roller coaster that carries you up and down, or you can go on another kind of ride that whirls you around in a circle. Similarly, there are different sorts of entertaining experiences in the theater.
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 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