Sam Shepard Quotes
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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 guess what I like is mostly country & western or else stuff that has a real blues feel to it.
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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 first started, I didn't really know how to structure a play.
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There's no way to escape the fact that we've grown up in a violent culture, we just can't get away from it, it's part of our heritage. I think part of it is that we've always felt somewhat helpless in the face of this vast continent. Helplessness is answered in many ways, but one of them is violence.
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Film is anti-language.
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My son, Walker, has a band called The Dust Busters. You know, he plays banjo, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin, so a lot of my interest in that kind of music comes from him constantly listening to this stuff. He's taught me the history of it. It's remarkable how these young kids are now turned on to more traditional old-time music.
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People are starved for the truth, and when something comes along that even looks like the truth, people will latch onto it because everything's so false.
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I'm a writer. The more I act, the more resistance I have to it. If you accept work in a movie, you accept to be entrapped for a certain part of time, but you know you're getting out. I'm also earning enough to keep my horses, buying some time to write.
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I don't attend costume parties.
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Hollywood is geared toward teenage idiocy.
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Writing for the theatre is so different to writing for anything else. Because what you write is eventually going to be spoken. That's why I think so many really powerful novelists can't write a play - because they don't understand that it's spoken - that it hits the air. They don't get that.
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Sides are being divided now. It's very obvious. So if you're on the other side of the fence, you're suddenly anti-American. It's breeding fear of being on the wrong side.
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Hats look exactly the same. There's no difference between The Writing Hat and The Acting Hat.
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I had two experiences with very close friends of mine who experienced aphasia, the loss of language. It shocked me.
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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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The wonderful thing about writing for theatre is you can go anywhere you want with the language. There are no limits. With film, they frown on language - it's always 'Too many words.'
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I am always relaxed.
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When I was a kid, we didn't have a TV until the late '50s, but I can remember watching Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Steve McQueen, and 'Gunsmoke.'
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I love Levon Helm - he's one of my favorite guys.
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The words I overuse are all adverbs.
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It's very easy to lose language - it can be shut off in a second.
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I feel very lucky and privileged to be a writer. I feel lucky in the sense that I can branch out into prose and tell different kinds of stories and stuff. But being a writer is so great because you're literally not dependent on anybody.
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All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.