Sam Shepard Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Sam Shepard's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Playwright Sam Shepard's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 68 quotes on this page collected since November 5, 1943! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
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  • You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.

  • When you see the way things deteriorate before your very eyes. Everything running down hill. It's kind of silly to even think about youth.

    Running   Silly   Eye  
    Sam Shepard (2009). “Buried Child”, p.99, Vintage
  • There's gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning.

    Sam Shepard (1997). “Plays”
  • 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.

    Two   Apples   Orange  
  • Keep away from fantasy. Shake off the image.

    Fantasy   Shakes  
    Sam Shepard (1997). “Plays”
  • Sides are being divided now. It's very obvious. So if you're on the other side of the fence, you're suddenly anti-American. It's breeding fear of being on the wrong side.

    Sides   Fence   Breeding  
  • After the falling out with my father, I worked on a couple of ranches - thoroughbred layup farms, actually - out toward Chino, California. That was fine for a little while, but I wanted to get out completely, and twenty miles away wasnt far enough.

    Couple   Father   Fall  
  • My dad's side of the family ... they're a real bizarre bunch, going back to the original colonies. That side's got a real tough strain of alcoholism. It goes back generations and generations, so that you can't remember when there was a sober grandfather.

    Dad   Real   Grandfather  
  • Words are tools of imagery in motion.

    Tools   Imagery  
    "Peter Dinklage’s Yearbook Photo Is A Be-Mulleted Masterpiece" by Caleb Reading, uproxx.com. June 4, 2014.
  • 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.

    Long   Alcohol   Gone  
    Sam Shepard (1984). “Sam Shepard Seven Plays”
  • I don't want to be a playwright, I want to be a rock and roll star.

    Sam Shepard (1997). “Plays”
  • I've heard writers talk about "discovering a voice," but for me that wasn't a problem. There were so many voices that I didn't know where to start.

    Writing   Voice   Problem  
  • [Rewriting is] a whole other art form; it's about craftsmanship.

    Art   Writing   Crafts  
  • 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.

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

    Fall   America   Tragedy  
    Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.
  • People talk about the 1960s in a nostalgic way, but to me it was terrifying. People were getting assassinated. There was Vietnam. There were race riots. It felt like everything was going to get blown up sky-high. It didn’t feel like flower power. It felt like Armageddon.

    Flower   Sky   Race Riots  
    Interview with Michael Almereyda, www.interviewmagazine.com. Published.
  • I like cars. I like travel. I like the idea of people breaking down and I'm the only one who can help them get on the road again. It would be like being a magician. Just open up the hood and cast your magic spell.

    Ideas   People   Car  
    Sam Shepard (1976). “Curse of the Starving Class: A Play in Three Acts”, p.19, Dramatists Play Service Inc
  • 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.

    Hate   Play   Acting  
  • Ive been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.

    Writing   Play   Want  
  • I had a definite sense of somehow being a passenger in an evil vehicle crusing through Paradise.

    Evil   Paradise   Vehicle  
  • The California I knew, old rancho California, is gone. It just doesn't exist, except maybe in little pockets. I lived on the edge of the Mojave Desert, an area that used to be farm country. There were all these fresh-produce stands with avocados and date palms. You could get a dozen artichokes for a buck or something. Totally wiped out now.

  • I'll develop my own image. I'm an original man. A one and only. I just need some help.

    Men   Needs   Helping  
    Sam Shepard (1997). “Plays”
  • Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.

    "Pulitzer Winner and ALS Patient Sam Shepard Dies at 73" by Mathew Shanley, www.raredr.com. July 31, 2017.
  • I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.

  • Ideas emerge from plays, not the other way around.

    Play   Ideas   Way  
    Sam Shepard (1984). “Fool for Love and Other Plays”, Dial Press
  • The fantastic thing about the theatre is that it can make something be seen that's invisible, and that's where my interest in theatre is- that you can be watching this thing happening with actors and costumes and light and set and language, and even plot, and something emerges from beyond that, and that's the image part that I'm looking for, that sort of added dimension.

    Light   Theatre   Plot  
    Sam Shepard (1984). “Fool for Love and Other Plays”, Bantam Books
  • 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.

  • It's hard to explain why exactly, but I think that when I began writing plays, it was from an actor's point of view more than anything. I had the feeling that if you put yourself in the position of the actor on stage and write from that perspective, it would give you a certain advantage in terms of being inside of the play.

    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • I was shot in the wrist when I was a kid. Deliberately.

    Kids   Shots   Wrists  
    Interview with Rosanna Greenstreet, www.theguardian.com. June 21, 2014.
  • 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.

    Writing   Light   Play  
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 68 quotes from the Playwright Sam Shepard, starting from November 5, 1943! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Sam Shepard quotes about: Character Country Hate Writing