Sam Shepard Quotes
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Dialogue is like jazz. Dialogue is creative.
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I feel like I'm a natural-born playwright, but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?
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I've always found it embarrassing to receive awards.
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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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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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I'm not in demand. I'm all washed up.
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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 keep endlessly busy with all kinds of stuff, mostly horses, cattle, livestock, things like that.
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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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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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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 didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.
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I was shot in the wrist when I was a kid. Deliberately.
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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 know, as an actor, you have to negotiate, but I can't handle the whole idea that art and commerce are synonymous. It drives me nuts.
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It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.
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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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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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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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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 still find it hard to believe that the whole era of jazz is over.
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I don't belong much anywhere.
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A good actor always sets you straight. If you've written a false moment and thought it was probably pretty great, the actor's gonna show you when he gets to that moment. They're the great test of the validity of the material.
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I used to work a lot on ranches where I grew up, and I had to rise at 5:30 in the morning.