Wallace Shawn Quotes

I used to worry about what would happen five or 10 years from now, but I don't anymore. I thought about going to medical school because that has always interested me, but decided against it.

Some ideas, like what you're going to do with your life, take time to form.

I've just grown up a lot and started to encounter some of the big decisions of life in terms of what career I wanted to do and figuring out personal relationships and things.

I don't see myself acting for the rest of my life.

I always have moments on set where I think, 'Oh my God, this is my life right now.' And it could've been so different.

It's not easy to decide what is best for you in the future.

I think when you are young and you don't really know what you want in life, you can commit to something and think at the time it is right.

In any case, I am not a great one to make plans for the future.

I believe in taking chances and living your life. Sometimes doors open and others close and you have to figure out which one you're going to take. I'm always for the one that's challenging.

You write your life story by the choices you make. You never know if they have been a mistake. Those moments of decision are so difficult.

When I got to 40 or so... I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on, and many that I had no control over whatsoever.

By definition, an actor's life is a recipe for regret. There are always roads you could have taken. But I've lived long enough to realise that each road has its own rewards.

I'm totally confused about what I'm going to do with my life.

How many crossroads are you allowed to have in life? I seem to have a lot of crossroads. I think maybe I crossed back across the same road too often.

When I was a kid I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I did know what I didn't want to do. I didn't want to grow up, have 2.2 kids, get married, the whole white picket fence thing.

As you get older, you start to really ask questions like, 'Is this the road I should be walking down?,' because every decision seems more final, as you get older.

Lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?

I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it.

Mortal experiences give us the opportunity to assess what we are doing with our lives.

I don't know if I will be acting all my life, honestly.

Maybe this is just horrible bad, but I think I've had enough successes to where the journey is more important to me now. There's no guarantee, no matter what. We get one run in life.

Do I regret how my life turned out? Of course not - not for a single second.

I started working at a time when most of my friends were still figuring their lives out.

You only have so much time in the day, and you only have so many working years. Where do you want to invest that life?

I was so invested in ballet, and it was my entire life. And then it was realizing that I didn't want it to be my entire life forever. And then it was this very specific life, and I wanted to learn about other things. So I modeled to fill the time because dancing was very much a job, even when I was 14 years old.