Sam Shepard Quotes & Sayings

The thing about American writers is that, as a group, they get stuck in the same idea: that we're a continent and the world falls away after us. And it's just nonsense. — Sam Shepard

This isn't champagne anymore. We went through the champagne a long time ago. This is serious stuff. The days of champagne are long gone. — Sam Shepard

You can't keep messing me around like this. It's been going on too long. I can't take it anymore. I get sick every time you come around. Then I get sick when you leave. You're like a disease to me. — Sam Shepard

Austin: Well it is like salvation sort of. I mean the smell. I love the smell of toast. And the sun's coming up. It makes me feel like anything's possible. Y'know? — Sam Shepard

Weston: Look at my outlook. You don't envy it, right?
Wesley: No.
Weston: That's because it's full of poison. Infected. And you recognize poison, right? You recognize it when you see it?
Wesley: Yes.
Weston: Yes, you do. I can see that you do. My poison scares you.
Wesley: Doesn't scare me.
Weston: No?
Wesley: No.
Weston: Good. You're growing up. I never saw my old man's poison until I was much older than you. Much older. And then you know how I recognized it?
Wesley: How?
Weston: Because I saw myself infected with it. That's how. I saw me carrying it around. His poison in my body. — Sam Shepard

When you die it's the end of your life. — Sam Shepard

He pictured both cities simultaneously, as though they hung on the extended arms of the orange clouds. Suspended. Tiny San Francisco dangling to the north: innocent, rich and a little bit silly. The sprawling, demented snake of L.A. to the south. Its fanged mouth wide open, eyes blazing, paralyzed in a lunge of pure paranoia. This was the place to be, he thought. Right here. In the middle. Smack in the belly of California where he could eyeball both from a distance. He could live inside the intestines of this valley while he spied on the brain and the genitals. — Sam Shepard

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. — Sam Shepard

When I just sit around my house and work, I can work two, three hours, and then I go off and ride a horse or do something that I perceive to be a lot more fun. — Sam Shepard

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. — Sam Shepard

You sometimes use the excuse, 'I'm a writer, dammit, I can do anything I want,' but that doesn't work. — Sam Shepard

When you write a play, you work out like a musician on a piece of music. You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come. — Sam Shepard

I'll develop my own image. I'm an original man. A one and only. I just need some help. — Sam Shepard

I don't understand my feelings. I really don't. I don't understand how I could hate you so much after so much time. How, no matter how much I'd like to not hate you, I hate you even more. It grows. — Sam Shepard

....and in that wink I understood there might be grown men in this world who actually get a spark out of life. — Sam Shepard

I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster. ... The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That's genius. — Sam Shepard

The words I overuse are all adverbs. — Sam Shepard

When I first started, I didn't really know how to structure a play. I could write dialogue, but I just sort of failed beyond that, and kind of went wherever I wanted to go. — Sam Shepard

I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer. — Sam Shepard

She refers to her past as the time before she was blown away. — Sam Shepard

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. — Sam Shepard

The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a craft but as a way into things that are not described. It's a thing of discovering. That's when writing is really working. You're on the trail of something, and you don't quite know what it is. — Sam Shepard

I'm not in demand. I'm all washed up. — Sam Shepard

The California I knew, old rancho California, is gone. It just doesn't exist, except maybe in little pockets. I lived on the edge of the Mojave Desert, an area that used to be farm country. There were all these fresh-produce stands with avocados and date palms. You could get a dozen artichokes for a buck or something. Totally wiped out now. — Sam Shepard

When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds. — Sam Shepard

We're being sold a brand new idea of patriotism. It never occurred to me that patriotism had to be advertised. Patriotism is something you deeply felt. You didn't have to wear it on your lapel or show it in your window or on a bumper sticker. That kind of patriotism does not appeal to me at all. — Sam Shepard

Those are the most monotonous fuckin' crickets I ever heard in my life. — Sam Shepard

You can't believe people when they look you in the eyes. You gotta' look behind them. See what they're standing in front of. What they're hiding. Everyone's hiding, Wes. Everybody. Nobody look like what they are. — Sam Shepard

You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by. — Sam Shepard

It's hard to explain why exactly, but I think that when I began writing plays, it was from an actor's point of view more than anything. I had the feeling that if you put yourself in the position of the actor on stage and write from that perspective, it would give you a certain advantage in terms of being inside of the play. — Sam Shepard

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez. — Sam Shepard

Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn't exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover. — Sam Shepard

Everyone wants a piece of land. It's the only sure investment. It can never depreciate like a car or a washing machine. Land will double its value in ten years. In less than that. Land is going up every day. — Sam Shepard

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. — Sam Shepard

My old man tried to force on me a notion of what it was to be a 'man.' And it destroyed my dad. — Sam Shepard

I was in the war. I know how to kill. I was over there. I know how to do it. I've done it before. It's no big deal. You just make an adjustment. You convince yourself it's all right. That's all. It's easy. You just slaughter them. — Sam Shepard

I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened. — Sam Shepard

You don't have to take it out on my typewrite ya' know. It's not the machine's fault that you can't write. It's a sin to do that to a good machine. — Sam Shepard

I feel like the writers that I'm drawn to, the writers that I really cling to, are the writers who seem to be writing out of a desperate act. It's like their writing is part of a survival kit. Those are the writers that I just absolutely cherish and carry with me everywhere I go. — Sam Shepard

Caryl Churchill is a writer of some note, but in the sack, she makes me explain everything. — Sam Shepard

I believe in my mask
The man I made up is me
I believe in my dance
And my destiny — Sam Shepard

I still haven't gotten over this thing of walking down the street and somebody recognizing you because you've been in a movie. There's this illusion that movie stars only exist in the movies. And to see one live is like seeing a leopard let out of the zoo. — Sam Shepard

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. — Sam Shepard

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. — Sam Shepard

I always thought the desert was the antithesis of peace - something that attacks you. So you don't go to the desert for peace. — Sam Shepard

So they take off after each other straight into an endless black prairie. The sun is just comin' down and they can feel the night on their backs. What they don't know is that each one of 'em is afraid, see. Each one separately thinks that he's the only one that's afraid. And they keep ridin' like that straight into the night. Not knowing. And the one who's chasin' doesn't know where the other one is taking him. And the one who's being chased doesn't know where he's going. — Sam Shepard

Hollywood is geared toward teenage idiocy. — Sam Shepard

My dad had a lot of bad luck. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. — Sam Shepard

Personality is everything that's false in a human: everything that's been added on to him and contrived. — Sam Shepard

I've come to feel that if I can't make something happen in under an hour and a half, it's not going to happen in a compelling way in a three-hour play. — Sam Shepard

Give me the keys. — Sam Shepard

I wanted to write a play about double nature ... one that wouldn't be symbolic or metaphorical or any of that stuff. I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided. It's a real thing, double nature. I think we're split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal. It's not so cute. Not some little thing we can get over. It's something we've got to live with — Sam Shepard

Being a writer is so great because you're literally not dependent on anybody. Whereas, as an actor, you have to audition or wait for somebody else to make a decision about how to use you, with writing, you can do it anywhere, anytime you want. You don't have to ask permission. — Sam Shepard

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. — Sam Shepard

There's gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning. — Sam Shepard

Character is an essential tendency. It can be covered up, it can be messed with, it can be screwed around with, but it can't be ultimately changed. It's the structure of our bones, the blood that runs through our veins. — Sam Shepard

I was shot in the wrist when I was a kid. Deliberately. — Sam Shepard

All that stuff about my father and my childhood is interesting up to a certain point, but I kind of capsized with the family drama a long time ago. Now I want to get away from that. Not that I won't return to it, but a certain element has been exhausted, and it feels like why regurgitate all this stuff? — Sam Shepard

Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster. — Sam Shepard

I like cars. I like travel. I like the idea of people breaking down and I'm the only one who can help them get on the road again. It would be like being a magician. Just open up the hood and cast your magic spell. — Sam Shepard

On stage, you're not limited at all because you're free in language: language is the source of the imagination. You can travel farther in language than you can in any film. — Sam Shepard

Words are tools of imagery in motion, — Sam Shepard

Love is the only disease that makes you feel better. — Sam Shepard

People talk about the 1960s in a nostalgic way, but to me it was terrifying. People were getting assassinated. There was Vietnam. There were race riots. It felt like everything was going to get blown up sky-high. It didn't feel like flower power. It felt like Armageddon. — Sam Shepard

My first job was with the Burns Detective Agency. They sent me over to the East River to guard coal barges during these god-awful hours like three to six in the morning. It wasn't a very difficult job
all I had to do was make a round every fifteen minutes
but it turned out to be a great environment for writing. I was completely alone in a little outhouse with an electric heater and a little desk. — Sam Shepard

Ideas emerge from plays, not the other way around. — Sam Shepard

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. — Sam Shepard

Keep away from fantasy. Shake off the image, — Sam Shepard

I had a definite sense of somehow being a passenger in an evil vehicle crusing through Paradise. — Sam Shepard

I'm inhabiting a life I'm not supposed to be in ... and at certain times in my life, I have felt a wrongness. And not a moral wrongness but a sense that this isn't what I was born to be doing. — Sam Shepard

It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common. — Sam Shepard

When you're looking for someone, you're looking for some aspect of yourself, even if you don't know it ... What we're searching for is what we lack. — Sam Shepard

Farm country
you know, hay, horses, cattle. It's the ideal situation for me. I like the physical endeavors that go with the farm
cutting hay, cleaning out stalls, or building a barn. You go do that and then come back to the writing. — Sam Shepard

When you see the way things deteriorate before your very eyes. Everything running down hill. It's kind of silly to even think about youth. — Sam Shepard

In real life we don't know what's going to happen next. So how can you be that way on a stage? Being alive to the possibility of not knowing exactly how everything is going to happen next - if you can find places to have that happen onstage, it can resonate with an experience of living. — Sam Shepard

I'm a great believer in chaos. I don't believe that you start with a formula and then you fulfill the formula. Chaos is a much better instigator, because we live in chaos - we don't live in a rigorous form. — Sam Shepard

Sometimes in someone's gestures you can notice how a parent is somehow inhabiting that person without there being any awareness of that. Sometimes you can look at your hand and see your father. — Sam Shepard

There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing. I'm not so interested in the divisions. I'm interested in the way things cross over. — Sam Shepard

Look it - you start out as an artist, I started out when I was nineteen, and you're full of defenses. You have all of this stuff to prove. You have all of these shields in front of you. All your weapons are out. It's like you're going into battle. You can accomplish a certain amount that way. But then you get to a point where you say, "But there's this whole other territory I'm leaving out." And that territory becomes more important as you grow older. You begin to see that you leave out so much when you go to battle with the shield and all the rest of it. You have to start including that other side or die a horrible death as an artist with your shield stuck on the front of your face forever. You can't grow that way. And I don't think you can grow as a person that way, either. There just comes a point when you have to relinquish some of that and risk becoming more open to the vulnerable side, which I think is the female side. It's much more courageous than the male side. — Sam Shepard

For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play. — Sam Shepard

I've heard writers talk about "discovering a voice," but for me that wasn't a problem. There were so many voices that I didn't know where to start. — Sam Shepard

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. — Sam Shepard

Democracy's a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it's no longer democracy, is it? It's something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism. — Sam Shepard

The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness. — Sam Shepard

The fantastic thing about the theatre is that it can make something be seen that's invisible, and that's where my interest in theatre is- that you can be watching this thing happening with actors and costumes and light and set and language, and even plot, and something emerges from beyond that, and that's the image part that I'm looking for, that sort of added dimension. — Sam Shepard

I've been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me. — Sam Shepard

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. — Sam Shepard

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. — Sam Shepard

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. — Sam Shepard

My dad's side of the family ... they're a real bizarre bunch, going back to the original colonies. That side's got a real tough strain of alcoholism. It goes back generations and generations, so that you can't remember when there was a sober grandfather. — Sam Shepard

I never considered myself a movie star, and I didn't want to become a movie star, because as soon as you do, you throw away that possibility of playing character. You really do. All of a sudden you're just an entity, you know? — Sam Shepard

I don't get offered leading parts. I suppose I've become a kind of character actor or sideman. I think it had to do with probably in the '90s, I refused so many leading roles that they gave up on me, or I just became unpopular, or I became old. All those reasons. — Sam Shepard

I don't want to be a playwright, I want to be a rock and roll star. — Sam Shepard

[Rewriting is] a whole other art form; it's about craftsmanship. — Sam Shepard

I think without writing I would feel completely useless. — Sam Shepard

In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man. The purpose of it, of course, was to write about myself. That character was always the least fully realized. Eighteen years later, you realize, That's what he was about. — Sam Shepard

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. — Sam Shepard