Sam Shepard Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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'm not in demand. I'm all washed up.
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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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I still find it hard to believe that the whole era of jazz is over.
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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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I wrote 'Buried Child' in a trailer at an old ranch house we had in California.
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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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Personality is everything that's false in a human: everything that's been added on to him and contrived.
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I've always found it embarrassing to receive awards.
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Dialogue is like jazz. Dialogue is creative.
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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.