Sam Shepard Quotes
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When you listen intensely to anything, you see how it can be improved.
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The words I overuse are all adverbs.
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I love Levon Helm - he's one of my favorite guys.
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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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It's very easy to lose language - it can be shut off in a second.
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To me, a strong sense of self isn't believing in a lot.
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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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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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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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Why would you want to be be counseled in your grief? It's too private.
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I think without writing I would feel completely useless.
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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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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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It's really great to see an actor find himself, in his sojourn.
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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'm not a big fan of anniversaries.
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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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Men lie all the time.
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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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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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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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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.