Sam Shepard Quotes
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I wrote 'Buried Child' in a trailer at an old ranch house we had in California.
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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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To sit on a ranch horse that's been broken in, it's like getting in a Porsche.
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When I just sit around my house and work, I can work two, three hours, and then I go off and ride a horse or do something that I perceive to be a lot more fun.
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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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More than any other art form I know of in America, country music speaks of the true relationship between the American male and the American female... Terrible and impossible.
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Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn't exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover.
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I remember, as a kid, going into other people's houses. Everything was different. The smells in the kitchen were different; the clothing was different. That bothered me. There's something very mysterious about other families and the way they function.
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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've been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.
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In real life we don't know what's going to happen next. So how can you be that way on a stage? Being alive to the possibility of not knowing exactly how everything is going to happen next - if you can find places to have that happen onstage, it can resonate with an experience of living.
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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 stay away from heavy-handed stuff, the good guy and the bad guy. It just doesn't interest me; all it does is create more fences between people, I think.
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I think most writers, in a sense, have this desire to disappear, to be absolutely anonymous, to be removed in some way: that comes out of the need to be a writer.
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I keep my horses out in the open, but when I was working the ranches, I had to clean the stalls. It was a horrible job.
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My old man tried to force on me a notion of what it was to be a 'man.' And it destroyed my dad.
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I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.
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The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a craft but as a way into things that are not described. It's a thing of discovering. That's when writing is really working. You're on the trail of something, and you don't quite know what it is.
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I'm extremely grateful that I found writing, but it doesn't make it any more peaceful.
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On every film, there are producers all over the place, and everyone's got to have an opinion. I think the screenplay is a beautiful form with great potential, but the environment around it is awful for a writer.
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I've always felt a great affinity with music. I've felt myself to be more of a musician than anything else, though I'm not proficient in any one instrument. But I think I have a musical sense of things... and writing seems to me to be a musical experience - rhythmically and in many other ways.
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I feel like the writers that I'm drawn to, the writers that I really cling to, are the writers who seem to be writing out of a desperate act. It's like their writing is part of a survival kit. Those are the writers that I just absolutely cherish and carry with me everywhere I go.
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I think comedy's harder to pull off on the screen than on the stage, anyway. Tragedy is easier on the screen... oddly enough.
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I guess what I like is mostly country & western or else stuff that has a real blues feel to it.