Top 70 Sam Shepard Quotes

More than any other art form I know of in America, country music speaks of the true relationship between the American male and the American female… Terrible and impossible.

I’ve been into horses as far back as I can remember. There is a particular kind here in America called the ‘quarter horse’ that I’m very interested in.

Dialogue is like jazz. Dialogue is creative.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

What I’m after is something different than supplying people with the idea that I’m writing an important play.

I guess what I like is mostly country & western or else stuff that has a real blues feel to it.

I see a lot of scripts, and very few of them leap off the page at you.

I love Levon Helm – he’s one of my favorite guys.

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

Hollywood is geared toward teenage idiocy.

Hats look exactly the same. There’s no difference between The Writing Hat and The Acting Hat.

I’m not put off so much by first-time directors if the script is great. If the script isn’t there, I’m not there.

People are starved for a way of life – they’re hunting for a way to be or to act toward the world.

To me, a strong sense of self isn’t believing in a lot.

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

Personality is everything that’s false in a human: everything that’s been added on to him and contrived.

When I first started in film, I was terrified of the camera.

I keep my horses out in the open, but when I was working the ranches, I had to clean the stalls. It was a horrible job.

To sit on a ranch horse that’s been broken in, it’s like getting in a Porsche.

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.

In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man.

What I like most about Bolano is his courage.

Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not the head. It moves us into an area of mystery.

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.

When you listen intensely to anything, you see how it can be improved.

I think comedy’s harder to pull off on the screen than on the stage, anyway. Tragedy is easier on the screen… oddly enough.

I wrote ‘Buried Child’ in a trailer at an old ranch house we had in California.

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.

Guys like Clyde McPhatter used to sing their tail ends off!

I still find it hard to believe that the whole era of jazz is over.

I never thought about having a daughter, and then I had a daughter, and it was a remarkable thing. It was very different from having a son and your response to it. With a son, it’s much more complex. And it’s probably because of my stuff in the past. With a daughter, I was surprised at how simple it is.

Careers don’t interest me. The only thing that interests me is continuing to be a poet on one level or another, whether acting or writing or directing.

A lot of American playwrights seem to have a career as a playwright. I don’t consider it a career at all.

Why would you want to be be counseled in your grief? It’s too private.

I always thought the desert was the antithesis of peace – something that attacks you. So you don’t go to the desert for peace.

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.

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.’

On every film, there are producers all over the place, and everyone’s got to have an opinion. I think the screenplay is a beautiful form with great potential, but the environment around it is awful for a writer.

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.

I don’t belong much anywhere.

When I first started, I didn’t really know how to structure a play.

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.

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.

I find the whole situation of confronting an audience terrifying.

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.

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.

I know, as an actor, you have to negotiate, but I can’t handle the whole idea that art and commerce are synonymous. It drives me nuts.

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.

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.

I remember, as a kid, going into other people’s houses. Everything was different. The smells in the kitchen were different; the clothing was different. That bothered me. There’s something very mysterious about other families and the way they function.

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.

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

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.

Directing feels great; I’m really happy to be doing this.

My old man tried to force on me a notion of what it was to be a ‘man.’ And it destroyed my dad.

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.

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.’

If you start trying to figure out yourself from the image everyone has of you, you run into a dead end.

I think most writers, in a sense, have this desire to disappear, to be absolutely anonymous, to be removed in some way: that comes out of the need to be a writer.

A good actor always sets you straight. If you’ve written a false moment and thought it was probably pretty great, the actor’s gonna show you when he gets to that moment. They’re the great test of the validity of the material.

It’s really great to see an actor find himself, in his sojourn.

Men lie all the time.

Film is anti-language.

I think Bolano had a generosity about him that was unique. He seemed to include so many people in the circle of his adventures, whereas I felt like I was pretty selfish.