Wallace Shawn Quotes

Who I am on stage is very, very different to who I am in real life.

Trying to give an individual a voice has always kind of been my mission in my life. As an actor, I've always seen that was something that needed to be done. You need to find that voice inside of you so that you can stand up and be who you really are.

Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.

I'm not acting, but I am acting.

I play myself all the time, on camera and off. What else can I do?

I'm now learning how to distinguish when I'm acting and when I'm not acting - offstage as well as onstage.

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

You can spend a bit of yourself when you give yourself to a character. At the end of a job, you have to remind yourself who and what you are.

Like, that was weird in 'Hamlet 2,' because I played myself there, fully myself, but then I realized, 'Oh, I'm not playing myself. I'm some weird version of myself.' So as an actress, you're always playing something, I don't even know who I am, how could I become me? I don't know what that is.

Dandyism is a lie which reveals the truth, and the truth is that we are what we pretend to be.

After this whole acting thing is over and done, you eventually have to be human. Some people are never human. It's very weird.

Before I was known, I would go on stage and pretend I was other people. Once I pretended I was mentally handicapped. It was really wrong. One time I was a bad magician. And one time I pretended I was a Christian comic.

I'm not really an impersonator.

It's all performing; that's what we do in life. We talk, we look, and we hear, and we listen. Your life is a performance.

At least when you're acting you can be someone. In front of the camera you have to be yourself. And who am I?

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

I find it very hard to play a part, then take it off like a cheap suit and become Mr Normal - Mr. Nice Guy.

I spend my working life pretending to be someone else.

I'm supposed to convince you, for two hours, that I'm somebody else. Now if you know everything about my life, if you think you've got me figured out and you think you know all my dark secrets, how am I ever going to convince you that I'm somebody else?

Actors use who they are to be someone else, but I would hate to ever think I'm playing myself. It's imagining being someone else that is the key motivating thing for me. So when people want to know about me, it makes me a bit unnerved.

Never think you can separate who you are from what you're doing.

When I do an impression of someone or when I am pretending to be someone else, something freaky happens: I feel the person I am mimicking behind my eyeballs. Their head is sitting perfectly inside mine, helping me project a false self out on to the world. And it's not always a choice.

You've got to play what people think you are, rather than what you are. You have to have a sense of what you are as you're playing what people think you are.

I find myself both as man and as myself something more determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see.

Many actors, I've read, are introverts, and many introverts, when socializing, feel like actors.