Sam Shepard Quotes

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Sam Shepard

Profession : Playwright

Birth : November 5, 1943

Writing for the theatre is so different to writing for anything else. Because what you write is eventually going to be spoken. That's why I think so many really powerful novelists can't write a play - because they don't understand that it's spoken - that it hits the air. They don't get that.

Sam Shepard

Film is anti-language.

Sam Shepard

Hollywood is geared toward teenage idiocy.

Sam Shepard

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.

Sam Shepard

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.

Sam Shepard

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

Sam Shepard

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 entrapped for a certain part of time, but you know you're getting out. I'm also earning enough to keep my horses, buying some time to write.

Sam Shepard

You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.

Sam Shepard

Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play.

Sam Shepard

I'm not in demand. I'm all washed up.

Sam Shepard

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

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.

Sam Shepard

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.

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.

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.

Sam Shepard

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.

Sam Shepard

You sometimes use the excuse, 'I'm a writer, dammit, I can do anything I want,' but that doesn't work.

Sam Shepard

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.

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.

Sam Shepard

Sometimes in someone's gestures you can notice how a parent is somehow inhabiting that person without there being any awareness of that. Sometimes you can look at your hand and see your father.

Sam Shepard