Sam Shepard Quotes

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Sam Shepard

Profession : Playwright

Birth : November 5, 1943

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

My son, Walker, has a band called The Dust Busters. You know, he plays banjo, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin, so a lot of my interest in that kind of music comes from him constantly listening to this stuff. He's taught me the history of it. It's remarkable how these young kids are now turned on to more traditional old-time music.

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

My father had a real short fuse. He had a tough life - had to support his mother and brother at a very young age when his dad's farm collapsed. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. My father was full of terrifying anger.

Sam Shepard

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.

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.

Sam Shepard

I keep endlessly busy with all kinds of stuff, mostly horses, cattle, livestock, things like that.

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

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.

Sam Shepard

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

Sam Shepard

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.

Sam Shepard

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.

Sam Shepard

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

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.

Sam Shepard

My dad had a lot of bad luck. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one.

Sam Shepard

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.

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

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

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'm not a big fan of anniversaries.

Sam Shepard