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" '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. "

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" 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

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" Acting is an escape from the boring person that I am in real life. "

" Interestingly, the actress who, in her own persona, may be gentle, shy, and socially awkward, someone whose hand trembles when pouring a cup of tea for a visiting friend, can convincingly portray an elegant, cruel aristocrat tossing off malicious epigrams in an eighteenth-century chocolate house. "

" I know that I am one and I've made a living as an actor and I enjoy being an actor, but when I'm not actually doing it, I forget that I do it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I have an enormous appetite to see life as I know it presented in front of my eyes. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In real life, every person is the leading man or woman. We don't think of ourselves as supporting or character actors. "

" 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. "

" I don't have a television, and I'm just not too up on television. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I have been vain since birth. I expected other people to like what I did, although my vanity has definitely diminished over the years. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" I think the whole system of education would change if I were in charge and had the ability to make changes. I don't think I would keep Princeton exactly being Princeton. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" As writers, we can't predict who might come along who might find our offerings valuable. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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! "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm afraid that the passage of time is mostly lost on me. If you were to open up my head you would see that I'm still brooding about statements, songs and issues from the third grade. The years between 1980 and today went by very, very quickly. "

Wallace Shawn

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" I have been vain since birth. "