Quotes by Wallace Shawn - Page 2

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.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
People
Play
Sides
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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 / Actor
Country
Scary
Stopping
Way
Emergency
Participate
Terrifying
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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.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
Excited
Littles
Looks
Proud
Signals
I Am Me Find
I Am Me Proud
Everyone
Else
Everyone Else
Individuals
Send
Tell
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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 / Actor
Artistic
People
Permission
Servant
Solve
Thinking
United States
Civil
Civil Servant
Required
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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 / Actor
Average
Average Person
Good Mood
Relevant
Thinking
Writing
Good Mood Good Mood
Month
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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.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
My Time
Play
Thinking
Writing
Time Thinking Me
Complete
Interpreted
Sentence
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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 / Actor
Jobs
Clerks
Shipping
Thinking
Life Done My Life
Clerk
Copy
Life My Life Done
Shop
Several
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You're always fighting the contradiction between the supposed intimacy of a two-person conversation and the blunt reality that you're trying to sell the play to people who are sitting maybe too far away from you.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
Fighting
Play
Reality
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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 / Actor
New York
Acting
Nine
Nine Months
Play
Writing
Certain Point
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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 / Actor
Behave
Evening
Views
Years
Life Enough Me
Incomprehensible
Plan
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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 / Actor
Acting
Believe
Dean
Truthful
Trying
Absolutely
Audiences
Throw
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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 / Actor
Children
Pretense
Thinking
Understanding
Drop
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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 / Actor
Children
Mindless
Puzzled
Roots
Team
Myself Better People
Myself Better Always
Citizen
Planet
Root
Teams
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I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing. I feel the actors are being put through a kind of nightmarish labor. They're like animals being forced to pull heavy carts of vegetables at incredible speeds.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
Animal
Play
Vegetables
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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 / Actor
Ashamed
Embarrassed
Nephew
Niece
What If
Wandered
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A play presents a self-enclosed little world for the audience to examine. It's an opportunity to look objectively at a group of people, to assess them, to react to them, and to measure oneself against them, to ask 'Am I like that?'
Wallace Shawn / Actor
Opportunity
Play
Self
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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 / Actor
Amusement
Circles
Different
Entertaining
Goes On
Roller Coaster
Up And Down
Carries
Circle
Coaster
Park
Ride
Roller
Similarly
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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 / Actor
Brooding
Statements
Time Today Me
Grade
Mostly
Passage
Third
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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 / Actor
Harder
People
Reason
Would Be
Funny Me People
Define
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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.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
Contrary
Imitating
Misconception
Portraying
On The Contrary
Reveal
Specialist
Truths
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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.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
Advice
Giving
Reality
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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.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
Advice
Percent
Scrap
Audition
Figuring
Memorize
Script
Tiniest
Young Actor
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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 / Actor
Beautiful
Bergman
Disturbing
Exposed
Frank
People
Play
Portraits
Beautiful World Me
Respond
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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 / Actor
Awful Lot
Classical
Composers
Mozart
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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.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
Children
Complicated
Hiding
Layers
People
Reality
Upset
Clearly
Cover
Emotions
Expressing
Well-Intentioned
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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.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
Awkward
Chocolate
Elegant
Gentle
Hands
House
Malicious
Persona
Pouring
Shy
Visiting
Aristocrat
Cruel
Cup
Interestingly
Portray
Socially
Tossing
Trembles
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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 / Actor
Point Of View
Relief
Signals
Views
Writing
Years
Individuals
Playwrights
Send
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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 / Actor
Kings
Actors
Daily Life
Performing
Play
Stage
Inside
Actor
Also
Part
Daily
Wizard
Hidden
Playing
Seem
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If my relation to each and every peasant in Cambodia is indeed exactly what the principles of morality would demand it to be, it's a miraculous coincidence, because it takes a lot of effort to behave correctly in regard to my friends, and from one end of the year to another I never give those peasants a single thought.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
Effort
Giving
Years
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I grew up in a very polite family, and I suppose my parents were both very polite, and from the time I was a young boy, I suspected that there were passions seething underneath and not being mentioned, and that was something that came to preoccupy me. Somehow I had some drive to write down what people might really be thinking.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
Boys
Passion
Writing
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I don't have an idea for a play until after I've finished writing it. I write first, and come up with what it's about later. My technique could be compared to having a large canvas and coming in every day and putting a dot on it somewhere, and after several years - literally - I begin to say, That reminds me of an elephant, so I think I'll make it one.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
Thinking
Writing
Years
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All of my plays have puzzled some people, and I'm happy to say delighted a few, but a lot of people have just not seen how quite to look at them. And this film... if you like my writing, you'll like this film. If you don't, you won't like the film. It's pretty faithful to - it's a pretty uncompromising presentation of my way of seeing things, I suppose.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
Faithful
People
Writing
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What I'm really involved in when I'm writing is something that no one ever mentions when they see any play. Writing is like trying to make gunpowder out of chemicals. You have these words and sentences and the strange meanings and associations that are attached to the words and sentences, and you're somehow cooking these things all up so that they suddenly explode and have a powerful effect. That's what absorbs me from day to day in writing a play.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
Play
Powerful
Writing
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I'm trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. The way I write is about life and is quite truthful, and there is a kind of brutal side to the relationship, and to the feelings, that makes it somewhat painful, but I think it's a very intense portrait of the relationship of two people. And a bit about what people feel like when they're alone, because it all takes place in one day, and during the day, they spend a lot of time alone in their different - you get to imagine what their fantasy lives are like.
Wallace Shawn / Actor
People
Thinking
Writing
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Wallace Shawn Quotes - Page 2

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