Sam Shepard Quotes
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It's very difficult to escape your background. You know, I don't think it's necessary to even try to escape it. More and more, I start to think that it's necessary to see exactly what it is that you inherited on both ends of the stick: your timidity, your courage, your self-deceit, and your honesty - and all the rest of it.
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I'm not put off so much by first-time directors if the script is great. If the script isn't there, I'm not there.
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The thing about American writers is that, as a group, they get stuck in the same idea: that we're a continent and the world falls away after us. And it's just nonsense.
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You don't have to do anything in the movies. You just sit there. Well, that's not entirely true. You do less.
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I see a lot of scripts, and very few of them leap off the page at you.
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There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing. I'm not so interested in the divisions. I'm interested in the way things cross over.
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My father had a real short fuse. He had a tough life - had to support his mother and brother at a very young age when his dad's farm collapsed. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. My father was full of terrifying anger.
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I try not to be in situations where I'm being grabbed at. For the most part, you can avoid them.
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I've been into horses as far back as I can remember. There is a particular kind here in America called the 'quarter horse' that I'm very interested in.
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For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.
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In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man.
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I'm inhabiting a life I'm not supposed to be in... and at certain times in my life, I have felt a wrongness. And not a moral wrongness but a sense that this isn't what I was born to be doing.
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I think Bolano had a generosity about him that was unique. He seemed to include so many people in the circle of his adventures, whereas I felt like I was pretty selfish.
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Dialogue is like jazz. Dialogue is creative.
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They say TV has a tendency to diminish actors, and I think that's probably true in the long run - it wears on 'em like bad dental work - but Cheech doesn't show any of the signs of being damaged that way. And as a man, he's fantastic.
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On stage, you're not limited at all because you're free in language: language is the source of the imagination. You can travel farther in language than you can in any film.
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I keep endlessly busy with all kinds of stuff, mostly horses, cattle, livestock, things like that.
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My dad had a lot of bad luck. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one.
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I was shot in the wrist when I was a kid. Deliberately.
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I'm not in demand. I'm all washed up.
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I've had it up to my ears with the personal mythology. It's getting kind of personally sickening. The personal stuff just turns out to be misinterpreted. I've had such an earful for so long, it's gotten tedious. I figure if you stay away from it, you're safe.
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When you write a play, you work out like a musician on a piece of music. You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come.
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I've always found it embarrassing to receive awards.
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I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.