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" Acting is an escape from the boring person that I am in real life. "
Wallace Shawn
Escape
I Am
Life
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" I led the life of an intellectual up until a certain age. I remember Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams' was a big favorite when I was 11. It sounded so interesting. And it really was! "
Wallace Shawn
Life
Age
Dreams
" My father was a jazz listener, and I think, at least before I was 5, I was not so into that. Although there were records that emphasized percussion that I liked, like Baby Dodds. "
Wallace Shawn
Father
Think
Before
" Contrary to the popular misconception, the actor is not necessarily a specialist in imitating or portraying what he knows about other people. On the contrary, the actor may simply be a person who's more willing than others to reveal some truths about himself. "
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Others
More
May
" 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
Other
Humanity
Believe
" 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
Giving
Thought
Others
" In my mind, the plays I was writing were extreme examples of art for art's sake. I didn't necessarily think that other people would love them, though I thought they probably would. "
Wallace Shawn
Mind
Love
People
" 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
Thought
Acting
New York
" 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
People
Why
Things
" 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
Daily Life
Daily
King
" The life of an actor can be very enviable. "
Wallace Shawn
Life
Actor
Enviable
" '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
Play
Things
Character
" I am recognized a lot for 'Clueless,' but I am recognized a great deal for 'The Princess Bride.' I don't know... maybe everybody who has seen that movie just goes out on the street. "
Wallace Shawn
Just
Princess
Great
" 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
Live
Person
Think
" I spend most of my time thinking about things like laundry and buying stationery supplies. "
Wallace Shawn
Thinking
Laundry
Like
" 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
Write
First
Never
" 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
Child
Myself
Own
" 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
Children
Performance
Think
" Even with my wife, I find sharing soup is hard. "
Wallace Shawn
Sharing
Soup
Hard
" 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
Nothing
My Life
Life
" 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
Know
Age
View
" 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
Me
Words
People
" 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
Life
Done
Acting
" Before I was 5, I did have a lot of time on my hands. I had no job and really no career, and I spent an awful lot of time listening to records. It was more the classical ones, really - Prokofiev, and I think there was some Mozart in there, and more impressionistic composers like Delius. "
Wallace Shawn
Listening
Time
Think
" 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
Acting
Building
Trying
" My plays have been strange from the beginning, and they never got unstrange. "
Wallace Shawn
Strange
Never
Got
" I have been vain since birth. "
Wallace Shawn
Since
Birth
Been
" I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing. "
Wallace Shawn
Pleasing
Me
Many
" 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
Never
Up
Thinking
" I probably have a higher opinion of my writing than the average person, at least when I'm in a good mood, but I don't really think of my plays as only being relevant to a particular month or year. "
Wallace Shawn
Think
Mood
Good
" We're in an emergency situation. The United States has become an absolutely terrifying country, and I would hope that I could participate in some way in stopping the horror and the brutality. "
Wallace Shawn
Situation
Country
Hope