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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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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
Children
Treated
Always
Putting
Think
Adults
Thinking
Worked
Pretense
Films
Naive
Understanding
Drop
Film
Performance
Anything
Performances
More quotes by Wallace Shawn
Acting is an escape from the boring person that I am in real life.
Wallace Shawn
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
I wrote my first play at the age of 10, 55 years ago, and I've always found it a fantastic relief to imagine I know what things would be like from the point of view of other individuals and to send out signals from where I actually am not. Playwrights never need to write from the place where they are.
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
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
Even with my wife, I find sharing soup is hard.
Wallace Shawn
Patriotism is considered to be an emotion a person ought to feel. But why? Why is it nobler to love your own country than to love someone else's?
Wallace Shawn
Sleep: a poor substitute for caffeine!
Wallace Shawn
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
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
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
I never planned to be an actor. It turned out I could make a living doing it.
Wallace Shawn
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
I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing.
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
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
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
In terms of number of movies, I've been in an extraordinary amount. If you count only the minutes I'm onscreen, it's not so long.
Wallace Shawn
I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write.
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
