Wallace Shawn Play Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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?'

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.

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.