Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

I spend most of my time thinking about things like laundry and buying stationery supplies.

In my early 20s, I studied history and politics, and I really thought that perhaps I would devote my life to that.

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.

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

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

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.

The life of an actor can be very enviable.

I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing.

I do things, and other people laugh at them. I rarely know what the joke is supposed to be or why they're laughing.

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.

I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write.

You know, I haven't written as much as most other writers. Certainly maybe those who keep a more regular schedule accomplish more.

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?

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.

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.

I'm not proud to be me, I'm not excited to be me, but I find that I am me, and like most other individuals, I send out little signals; I tell everyone else how everything looks from where I am.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.