Sam Shepard Quotes

51 quotes in 812 categories

• It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.
• You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• She refers to her past as the time before she was "blown away.
• I had a definite sense of somehow being a passenger in an evil vehicle crusing through Paradise.
• I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is me I believe in my dance-- And my destiny
• 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.
• When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in.
• I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster. … The temptation towards resolution,…
• 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…
• 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…

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