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" I do things, and other people laugh at them. I rarely know what the joke is supposed to be or why they're laughing. "
Wallace Shawn
People
Why
Things
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" I spend most of my time thinking about things like laundry and buying stationery supplies. "
Wallace Shawn
Thinking
Laundry
Like
" 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
Today
See
Me
" 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. "
Wallace Shawn
Living
Know
I Am
" 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
Thought
People
Me
" 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
Problems
People
Think
" I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write. "
Wallace Shawn
Time
Free
More
" 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
Children
Performance
Think
" 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. "
Wallace Shawn
Know
Someone
Hope
" 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.' "
Wallace Shawn
Play
Funny
Because
" 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. "
Wallace Shawn
Nothing
My Life
Life
" 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
Acting
Building
Trying
" 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. "
Wallace Shawn
Once
Never
Carry
" 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
Life
Evening
Enough
" As writers, we can't predict who might come along who might find our offerings valuable. "
Wallace Shawn
Come
Along
Who
" 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. "
Wallace Shawn
Change
Keep
Think
" In terms of number of movies, I've been in an extraordinary amount. If you count only the minutes I'm onscreen, it's not so long. "
Wallace Shawn
Extraordinary
Number
Movies
" 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
Child
Myself
Own
" I have an enormous appetite to see life as I know it presented in front of my eyes. "
Wallace Shawn
Front
Know
Life
" 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. "
Wallace Shawn
Father
Think
Before
" I have been vain since birth. "
Wallace Shawn
Since
Birth
Been
" 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
Writing
Write
Me
" I never grew up thinking, 'One day I will play so and so' because I wasn't expecting to be an actor at all. "
Wallace Shawn
Never
Up
Thinking
" 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
Life
Done
Acting
" I never planned to be an actor. It turned out I could make a living doing it. "
Wallace Shawn
Never
Actor
Doing
" 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
Roller Coaster
Ride
Circle
" 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
Want
Nephew
Choose
" 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
Daily Life
Daily
King
" I don't happen to have a sense of humor personally, so I don't know what's funny about a character... This happens to be a feature of my life generally. "
Wallace Shawn
Character
My Life
Funny
" 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
Situation
Country
Hope
" 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
Know
Age
View