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" I have been vain since birth. "
Wallace Shawn
Since
Birth
Been
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" In my early 20s, I studied history and politics, and I really thought that perhaps I would devote my life to that. "
Wallace Shawn
Early
Politics
My Life
" 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
" 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
Work
Cry
Community
" 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
Life
Evening
Enough
" When I was first exposed to the films of Ingmar Bergman, I found them frank and disturbing portraits of the world we live in, but that was not something that displeased me. They were beautiful. I thought people would respond to my plays the way I responded to Bergman's films. "
Wallace Shawn
Beautiful
World
Thought
" I never planned to be an actor. It turned out I could make a living doing it. "
Wallace Shawn
Never
Actor
Doing
" 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
" I was making my living from a joke about my appearance that I didn't understand, and in a way still don't, because when I look in a mirror it doesn't seem funny to me. "
Wallace Shawn
Way
Funny
Appearance
" 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
Problems
People
Think
" 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
Want
Nephew
Choose
" Even with my wife, I find sharing soup is hard. "
Wallace Shawn
Sharing
Soup
Hard
" I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write. "
Wallace Shawn
Time
Free
More
" 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
" The life of an actor can be very enviable. "
Wallace Shawn
Life
Actor
Enviable
" 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
Character
My Life
Funny
" Acting is an escape from the boring person that I am in real life. "
Wallace Shawn
Escape
I Am
Life
" 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
" 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
" 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
Extraordinary
Number
Movies
" In real life, every person is the leading man or woman. We don't think of ourselves as supporting or character actors. "
Wallace Shawn
Think
Man
Character
" You can go to a play that is enjoyable because it's funny, and then on the next night you can go to a play that's enjoyable because it's 'disturbing.' "
Wallace Shawn
Play
Funny
Because
" In an amusement park, you can go on a roller coaster that carries you up and down, or you can go on another kind of ride that whirls you around in a circle. Similarly, there are different sorts of entertaining experiences in the theater. "
Wallace Shawn
Roller Coaster
Ride
Circle
" 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
Country
Love
Someone
" I don't have a television, and I'm just not too up on television. "
Wallace Shawn
Just
Too
Television
" 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
" As writers, we can't predict who might come along who might find our offerings valuable. "
Wallace Shawn
Come
Along
Who
" 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
Thought
People
Me
" 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 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
" 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