Wallace Shawn Quotes

. . . Yes, I'm an aesthete. I like beauty.
Yes – poor countries are beautiful. Poor people are beautiful. It's a wonderful feeling to have money in a country where most people are poor, to ride in a taxi through horrible slums.
Yes – a beggar can be beautiful. A beggar can have beautiful lips, beautiful eyes. You're far from home. To you, her simple shawl seems elegant, direct, the right way to dress. You see her approaching from a great distance. She's old, thin, and yes, she looks sick, very sick, near death. But her face is beautiful – seductive, luminous. You like her – you're drawn to her. Yes, you think – there's money in your purse – you'll give her some of it.
And a voice says – Why not all of it? Why not give her all you have?
Be careful, that's a question that could poison your life. Your love of beauty could actually kill you.
If you hear that question, it means you're sick. You're mentally sick. You've had a breakdown.

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.

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

I am recognized a lot for 'Clueless,' but I am recognized a great deal for 'The Princess Bride.' I don't know ... maybe everybody who has seen that movie just goes out on the street.

Escape before it's too late.

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 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 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 was clever enough to know that John Donne was offering something that was awfully enjoyable. I just wasn't clever enough to actually enjoy it.

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.

ANDRÉ: . . . And when I was at Findhorn I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted himself to saving trees, and he'd just got back from Washington lobbying to save the Redwoods. And he was eighty-four years old, and he always travels with a backpack because he never knows where he's going to be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, "Where are you from?" And I said, "New York." And he said, "Ah, New York, yes, that's a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?" And I said, "Oh, yes." And he said, "Why do you think they don't leave?" And I gave him different banal theories. And he said, "Oh, I don't think it's that way at all." He said, "I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they've built - they've built their own prison - and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have - having been lobotomized - the capacity to leave the prison they've made or even to see it as a prison." And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, "This is a pine tree." And he put it in my hand. And he said, "Escape before it's too late.

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

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.

I never grew up thinking, 'One day I will play so and so' because I wasn't expecting to be an actor at all.

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.

Even with my wife, I find sharing soup is hard.

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

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.

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.

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 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 don't know about you, but I only have one life, and I don't want to spend it in a sewer of injustice.

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'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.

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

'The Princess Bride' is by far the most popular film I've ever done. I don't think I'll ever top it.

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

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.

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.

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.

Revenge and punishment both imply, "Even if I'd been you, and I'd had your life, I would never have done what you did." And that in turn implies, "I wouldn't have done it, because I'm better than you." But the person who says, "I'm better than you" is taking a serious step in a very dangerous direction. And the person who says, "Even if I'd had your life, I would never have done what you did" is very probably wrong.

But because we've all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.

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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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

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.

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.

We're just going around all day like unconscious machines, and meanwhile there's all this rage and worry and uneasiness just building up and building up inside us

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

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 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.

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.

Who says one instance of writing has anything in common with another instance?

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

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.

I have been vain since birth.

WALLY: . . . That may be why I never understand what's going on at a party, and I'm always completely confused. I mean, we'll come home, and Debby will describe some incredible incident, and I won't have even noticed it. Everything passes in a kind of trance. You know, Debby once said after one of these New York evenings that she thought she'd traveled a greater distance just by journeying from her origins in the suburbs of Chicago to that New York evening than her grandmother had traveled in making her way from the steppes of Russia to the suburbs of Chicago.

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?'

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.