Sam Shepard quotes

When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in. (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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Sam Shepard
I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is me I believe in my dance-- And my destiny. View quote
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. View quote
Sam Shepard
You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by. View quote
Sam Shepard
People are starved for a way of life - they're hunting for a way to be or to act toward the world. View quote
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. View quote
Sam Shepard
The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness. View quote
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 got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened. View quote
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. View quote
Sam Shepard
I still find it hard to believe that the whole era of jazz is over. View quote
Sam Shepard
All good writing comes out of aloneness. View quote
Sam Shepard
Hollywood is geared toward teenage idiocy. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Sam Shepard
Personality is everything that's false in a human: everything that's been added on to him and contrived. View quote
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 didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Sam Shepard