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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
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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
Play
Started
Writing
Went
Acting
Studio
Point
Plays
Learn
Studios
Around
Nine
Thought
York
Certain
Months
More quotes by Wallace Shawn
From being a writer of plays, it was not that surprising that somebody thought of giving me a job as an actor. After I played one part, others came along.
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
I don't have a television, and I'm just not too up on television.
Wallace Shawn
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
I love going to plays. There's a subconscious side to it, obviously-some people like to be spanked for XYZ psychological reasons, and I like to go to plays, and I can't entirely explain why.
Wallace Shawn
Escape before it’s too late.
Wallace Shawn
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
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
In real life, every person is the leading man or woman. We don't think of ourselves as supporting or character actors.
Wallace Shawn
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
Sleep: a poor substitute for caffeine!
Wallace Shawn
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
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
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
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
I have an enormous appetite to see life as I know it presented in front of my eyes.
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
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
I'm a very lucky man. It's a beautiful thing for a writer, to see people allowing your words to enter their own unconscious and their souls.
Wallace Shawn