Best 68 quotes of Wallace Shawn on MyQuotes

My personal life is lived as 'me,' but my professional life is lived as other people. In other words, when I go to the office, I lie down, dream, and become 'someone else.' That's my job.

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

My style as a human being is to indulge people who need to escape, yet I insist on confronting them as a playwright. It's quite embarrassing, it's quite unpleasant, it's quite awkward.

Sleep: a poor substitute for caffeine!

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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

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.

Actually, we shot it over two days and the ghost of Danny DeVito was devastatingly present the whole time.

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.

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.