Sam Shepard Quotes
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I was shot in the wrist when I was a kid. Deliberately.
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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 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 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'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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A lot of American playwrights seem to have a career as a playwright. I don't consider it a career at all.
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I always thought the desert was the antithesis of peace - something that attacks you. So you don't go to the desert for peace.
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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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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 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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I used to work a lot on ranches where I grew up, and I had to rise at 5:30 in the morning.
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I guess what I like is mostly country & western or else stuff that has a real blues feel to it.
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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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All good writing comes out of aloneness.
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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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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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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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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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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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With acting, you can find a way to make it interesting for yourself, if nobody else - even on big-budget films. But you're very much on your own.
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I am always relaxed.
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I don't belong much anywhere.
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What I'm after is something different than supplying people with the idea that I'm writing an important play.
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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.