Top 60 Wallace Shawn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Escape before it’s too late.”

— Wallace Shawn

2. “Sleep: a poor substitute for caffeine!”

— Wallace Shawn

3. “It’s obviously a characteristic of human beings that we like to feel superior to others, but our problem is we are not superior.”

— Wallace Shawn

4. “I spend most of my time thinking about things like laundry and buying stationery supplies.”

— Wallace Shawn

5. “Who says one instance of writing has anything in common with another instance?”

— Wallace Shawn

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

— Wallace Shawn

7. “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.”

— Wallace Shawn

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

— Wallace Shawn

9. “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.”

— Wallace Shawn

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

— Wallace Shawn

11. “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

12. “In my early 20s, I studied history and politics, and I really thought that perhaps I would devote my life to that.”

— Wallace Shawn

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Wallace Shawn

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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.”

— Wallace Shawn

20. “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.”

— Wallace Shawn

21. “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.”

— Wallace Shawn

22. “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

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

— Wallace Shawn

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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.”

— Wallace Shawn

27. “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.”

— Wallace Shawn

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

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

— Wallace Shawn

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

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

— Wallace Shawn

39. “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

40. “I don’t have a television, and I’m just not too up on television.”

— Wallace Shawn

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “She knows very well that the way to find happiness in this world is not to hate your life but to somehow learn how to accept your life. Take pride in your work, whatever it is. Derive whatever pleasure you can from whatever surrounds you – the sky, the people you like, the light falling on the brick wall.”

— Wallace Shawn

46. “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

47. “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

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

— Wallace Shawn

49. “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

50. “I don’t see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing.”

— Wallace Shawn