Sam Shepard Quotes
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I'm still very much a believer in the spontaneity of certain kinds of writing. But then you have to eventually, when you're writing a long play, make adjustments along the way - all kinds of adjustments.
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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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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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All good writing comes out of aloneness.
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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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It's really great to see an actor find himself, in his sojourn.
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Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play.
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Why would you want to be be counseled in your grief? It's too private.
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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 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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I'm not a big fan of anniversaries.
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When you listen intensely to anything, you see how it can be improved.
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To me, a strong sense of self isn't believing in a lot.
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It's funny, in a way the actor is a writer. It's not like the two things are so separate as to be like apples and oranges. The writer and the actor are one.
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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 a way of life - they're hunting for a way to be or to act toward the world.
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Directing feels great; I'm really happy to be doing this.
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I think without writing I would feel completely useless.
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What I like most about Bolano is his courage.
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When you're 19 and writing plays, you think every actor is full of it. They just can't handle your brilliant material.
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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.
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Men lie all the time.
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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.