Best Sam Shepard Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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 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

I went to drama school at NYU for serious acting. So I was doing Chekov and Sam Shepard plays. — Casey Wilson

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

My first plays were amazingly bad, but I had a teacher who thought I had promise, and he kept working with me. I finally went to a summer workshop before my senior year with people like Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes who encouraged me to write from my subconscious, and suddenly all this material about culture clash came out. — David Henry Hwang

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

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

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

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

I've been off drugs and booze since I almost killed myself on speed two weeks ago. But my gratitude for being alive can't last for ever. — Johnny Dark

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

I really didn't know much about theater. After I signed on, I started reading a lot of Sam Shepard plays just to brush up on my history and do some research. — Taissa Farmiga

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

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

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

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

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

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