Sam Shepard Quotes
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I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself.
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After the falling out with my father, I worked on a couple of ranches - thoroughbred layup farms, actually - out toward Chino, California. That was fine for a little while, but I wanted to get out completely, and twenty miles away wasn't far enough.
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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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The words I overuse are all adverbs.
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People are starved for a way of life - they're hunting for a way to be or to act toward the world.
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To me, a strong sense of self isn't believing in a lot.
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Hollywood is geared toward teenage idiocy.
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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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To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing.
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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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You sometimes use the excuse, 'I'm a writer, dammit, I can do anything I want,' but that doesn't work.
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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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What I like most about Bolano is his courage.
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It's very easy to lose language - it can be shut off in a second.
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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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When you listen intensely to anything, you see how it can be improved.
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I'm not a big fan of anniversaries.
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I basically live out of my truck - I mean from place to place. I feel more at home in my truck than just about anywhere, which is a sad thing to say, but it's true.
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Directing feels great; I'm really happy to be doing this.
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It's really great to see an actor find himself, in his sojourn.
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There is this aura that the three-act play is the important one: it's the one that you do to win the Pulitzer. Some part of you falls for that, and then after a while, you don't fall for that.
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I think a part of the reason that those early plays were short was that I just kept having these ideas, and I'd just go off and write them. I wasn't trying to write one-act plays - it's just how the ideas would be expressed. Every condition I was in seemed like it could be a play.
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The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness.
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You can write 16 plays and not make as much money as you did doing one movie.