Wallace Shawn

Patriotism is considered to be an emotion a person ought to feel. But why? Why is it nobler to love your own country than to love someone else's?

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.

In my mind, the plays I was writing were extreme examples of art for art's sake. I didn't necessarily think that other people would love them, though I thought they probably would.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The life of an actor can be very enviable.

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

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.

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.