Wallace Shawn

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I sincerely believe that if Bush and Cheney recognized the full humanity of other people’s mothers around the world, they wouldn’t commit the crimes they commit.