Quotes from Sam Shepard

I used to work a lot on ranches where I grew up, and I had to rise at 5:30 in the morning.

I see a lot of scripts, and very few of them leap off the page at you.

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.

I don't attend costume parties.

I don't belong much anywhere.

I'm extremely grateful that I found writing, but it doesn't make it any more peaceful.

I'm not a big fan of anniversaries.

I guess what I like is mostly country & western or else stuff that has a real blues feel to it.

I never considered myself a movie star, and I didn't want to become a movie star, because as soon as you do, you throw away that possibility of playing character. You really do. All of a sudden you're just an entity, you know?

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

I never thought about having a daughter, and then I had a daughter, and it was a remarkable thing. It was very different from having a son and your response to it. With a son, it's much more complex. And it's probably because of my stuff in the past. With a daughter, I was surprised at how simple it is.

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

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.

When I was a kid, we didn't have a TV until the late '50s, but I can remember watching Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Steve McQueen, and 'Gunsmoke.'

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.

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

A lot of American playwrights seem to have a career as a playwright. I don't consider it a career at all.

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 feel like the writers that I'm drawn to, the writers that I really cling to, are the writers who seem to be writing out of a desperate act. It's like their writing is part of a survival kit. Those are the writers that I just absolutely cherish and carry with me everywhere I go.

I know, as an actor, you have to negotiate, but I can't handle the whole idea that art and commerce are synonymous. It drives me nuts.

They say TV has a tendency to diminish actors, and I think that's probably true in the long run - it wears on 'em like bad dental work - but Cheech doesn't show any of the signs of being damaged that way. And as a man, he's fantastic.

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.

Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not the head. It moves us into an area of mystery.

If you start trying to figure out yourself from the image everyone has of you, you run into a dead end.