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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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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
Life
Jobs
Shop
Like
Didn
Copies
Seems
Shops
Done
Several
Clerk
Going
Worked
Shipping
Would
Seem
Briefly
Think
Movie
Clerks
Thinking
Acting
Copy

More quotes by Wallace Shawn

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I never grew up thinking, 'One day I will play so and so' because I wasn't expecting to be an actor at all.
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 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
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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 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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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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I don't have a television, and I'm just not too up on television.
Wallace Shawn
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I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write.
Wallace Shawn
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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
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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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Sleep: a poor substitute for caffeine!
Wallace Shawn
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Even with my wife, I find sharing soup is hard.
Wallace Shawn
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Who says one instance of writing has anything in common with another instance?
Wallace Shawn
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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
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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 spend most of my time thinking about things like laundry and buying stationery supplies.
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 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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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'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