Sam Shepard Quotes
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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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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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Hats look exactly the same. There's no difference between The Writing Hat and The Acting Hat.
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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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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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To me, a strong sense of self isn't believing in a lot.
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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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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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Men lie all the time.
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When you listen intensely to anything, you see how it can be improved.
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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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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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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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Directing feels great; I'm really happy to be doing this.
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What I like most about Bolano is his courage.
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I'm not a big fan of anniversaries.
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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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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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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.