Sam Shepard Quotes - Page 3

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.

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.

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 feel very lucky and privileged to be a writer. I feel lucky in the sense that I can branch out into prose and tell different kinds of stories and stuff. But being a writer is so great because youre literally not dependent on anybody.

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

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

I still haven't gotten over this thing of walking down the street and somebody recognizing you because you've been in a movie. There's this illusion that movie stars only exist in the movies. And to see one live is like seeing a leopard let out of the zoo.

All that stuff about my father and my childhood is interesting up to a certain point, but I kind of capsized with the family drama a long time ago. Now I want to get away from that. Not that I won't return to it, but a certain element has been exhausted, and it feels like why regurgitate all this stuff?

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.

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.

I was in the war. I know how to kill. I was over there. I know how to do it. I've done it before. It's no big deal. You just make an adjustment. You convince yourself it's all right. That's all. It's easy. You just slaughter them.

[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.

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.

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.

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.