Top 30 Wallace Shawn Quotes

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’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.

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?

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

I never planned to be an actor. It turned out I could make a living doing it.

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.

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.

The life of an actor can be very enviable.

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

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.

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

My plays have been strange from the beginning, and they never got unstrange.

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

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’m being mocked because I don’t live up to a socially determined view of what other people think a person should look like.

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.’

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.

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.