Quote

I choose parts because I don't want to be embarrassed when the movie comes out. What if my friends were to see the movie? What if my niece or nephew wandered into the theater and saw the movie? I don't want to be too ashamed of it.

Wallace Shawn

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Choose
Wandered
Movie
Niece
Friends
Nephew
Comes
Embarrassed
Ashamed
Parts
Theater
Saws

More quotes by Wallace Shawn

Image
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
Image
My plays have been strange from the beginning, and they never got unstrange.
Wallace Shawn
Image
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.
Wallace Shawn
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I don't have a television, and I'm just not too up on television.
Wallace Shawn
Image
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
Image
Even with my wife, I find sharing soup is hard.
Wallace Shawn
Image
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
Image
I never planned to be an actor. It turned out I could make a living doing it.
Wallace Shawn
Image
As writers, we can't predict who might come along who might find our offerings valuable.
Wallace Shawn
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing.
Wallace Shawn
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Acting is an escape from the boring person that I am in real life.
Wallace Shawn
Image
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