Sam Shepard
13 quotes
Biography
"I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is meI believe in my dance-- And my destiny"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I'm not a big fan of anniversaries."
"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."
"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."
"My old man tried to force on me a notion of what it was to be a 'man.' And it destroyed my dad."