Sam Shepard Quotes

When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in.

Love is the only disease that makes you feel better.

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.

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.

I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is me I believe in my dance-- And my destiny

Ideas emerge from plays, not the other way around.

Words are tools of imagery in motion.

When you're looking for someone, you're looking for some aspect of yourself, even if you don't know it ... What we're searching for is what we lack.

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.

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

Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.

The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness.

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

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.

When you die it's the end of your life.

She refers to her past as the time before she was "blown away.

Keep away from fantasy. Shake off the image.

When I first started, I didn't really know how to structure a play. I could write dialogue, but I just sort of failed beyond that, and kind of went wherever I wanted to go.

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

The words I overuse are all adverbs.

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.

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.

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

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.

I don't want to be a playwright, I want to be a rock and roll star.

I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.

There's gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning.

I think without writing I would feel completely useless.

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.

I don't understand my feelings. I really don't. I don't understand how I could hate you so much after so much time. How, no matter how much I'd like to not hate you, I hate you even more. It grows.

Hollywood is geared toward teenage idiocy.

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

Caryl Churchill is a writer of some note, but in the sack, she makes me explain everything.

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

I was shot in the wrist when I was a kid. Deliberately.

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

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 old man tried to force on me a notion of what it was to be a 'man.' And it destroyed my dad.

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.

You don't have to take it out on my typewrite ya' know. It's not the machine's fault that you can't write. It's a sin to do that to a good machine.

You can’t keep messing me around like this. It’s been going on too long. I can’t take it anymore. I get sick every time you come around. Then I get sick when you leave. You’re like a disease to me.

I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is meI believe in my dance-- And my destiny