Top 166 Quotes & Sayings by Sam Shepard - Page 2

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

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

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.

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.

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.

When you're 19 and writing plays, you think every actor is full of it. They just can't handle your brilliant material.

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.'

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

I try not to be in situations where I'm being grabbed at. For the most part, you can avoid them.

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

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.

I'm not a big fan of anniversaries.

I love Levon Helm - he's one of my favorite guys.

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.

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.

I feel like I'm a natural-born playwright, but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?

Dialogue is like jazz. Dialogue is creative.

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.

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

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 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'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.

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

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.'

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.

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

I find the whole situation of confronting an audience terrifying.

You don't have to do anything in the movies. You just sit there. Well, that's not entirely true. You do less.

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

I don't belong much anywhere.

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.

I have a cellphone, but I have no Google, I have no gaggle.

It's very difficult to escape your background. You know, I don't think it's necessary to even try to escape it. More and more, I start to think that it's necessary to see exactly what it is that you inherited on both ends of the stick: your timidity, your courage, your self-deceit, and your honesty - and all the rest of it.

People are starved for the truth, and when something comes along that even looks like the truth, people will latch onto it because everything's so false.

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.

What I like most about Bolano is his courage.

My dad was a kind of semiprofessional Dixieland-type drummer, and I learned the drums from him. When I was about twelve, we bought our first Ludwig drum set from a pawnshop - a marching-band bass drum, great big tom-toms, and big, deep snare drums.

I stay away from heavy-handed stuff, the good guy and the bad guy. It just doesn't interest me; all it does is create more fences between people, I think.

I've always felt a great affinity with music. I've felt myself to be more of a musician than anything else, though I'm not proficient in any one instrument. But I think I have a musical sense of things... and writing seems to me to be a musical experience - rhythmically and in many other ways.

Film is anti-language.

I'm extremely grateful that I found writing, but it doesn't make it any more peaceful.

I've always found it embarrassing to receive awards.

They say TV has a tendency to diminish actors, and I think that's probably true in the long run - it wears on 'em like bad dental work - but Cheech doesn't show any of the signs of being damaged that way. And as a man, he's fantastic.

Grief is bizarre territory because there's no predicting how long it'll take to get over certain things. You just don't know how long it's going to resound in your life.

I'm not denying that it's exciting to have a play on Broadway.

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

Men lie all the time.

It's very easy to lose language - it can be shut off in a second.

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

I had two experiences with very close friends of mine who experienced aphasia, the loss of language. It shocked me.

I used to work a lot on ranches where I grew up, and I had to rise at 5:30 in the morning.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I don't attend costume parties.