Quotes from Sam Shepard

I'm not denying that it's exciting to have a play on Broadway.

I always thought the desert was the antithesis of peace - something that attacks you. So you don't go to the desert for peace.

Dialogue is like jazz. Dialogue is creative.

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

I think Bolano had a generosity about him that was unique. He seemed to include so many people in the circle of his adventures, whereas I felt like I was pretty selfish.

It's my private life, and it's not up for grabs.

On every film, there are producers all over the place, and everyone's got to have an opinion. I think the screenplay is a beautiful form with great potential, but the environment around it is awful for a writer.

Directing feels great; I'm really happy to be doing this.

I think most writers, in a sense, have this desire to disappear, to be absolutely anonymous, to be removed in some way: that comes out of the need to be a writer.

I had two experiences with very close friends of mine who experienced aphasia, the loss of language. It shocked me.

I think a part of the reason that those early plays were short was that I just kept having these ideas, and I'd just go off and write them. I wasn't trying to write one-act plays - it's just how the ideas would be expressed. Every condition I was in seemed like it could be a play.

Personality is everything that's false in a human: everything that's been added on to him and contrived.

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

I've always felt a great affinity with music. I've felt myself to be more of a musician than anything else, though I'm not proficient in any one instrument. But I think I have a musical sense of things... and writing seems to me to be a musical experience - rhythmically and in many other ways.

When I first started in film, I was terrified of the camera.

I find the whole situation of confronting an audience terrifying.

Grief is bizarre territory because there's no predicting how long it'll take to get over certain things. You just don't know how long it's going to resound in your life.

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

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

There is this aura that the three-act play is the important one: it's the one that you do to win the Pulitzer. Some part of you falls for that, and then after a while, you don't fall for that.

VINCE: We'd never make it. We'd drive and we'd drive and we'd drive and we'd never make it. We'd think we were getting farther and farther away. That's what we'd think.

Now? Why now? Why am I missing her now, Frankie? Why not then? When she was there? Why am I afraid that I'm gonna' lose her when she's already gone. And this fear--this fear swarms through me--floods my whole body 'til there's nothing left. Nothing left of me. And then it turns--it turns to a fear for my whole life. Like my whole life is lost from losing her. Gone. That I'll die like this. Lost. Just lost.

Like some dogs, you don't want to catch his eye.

birds back home have some size and respect for human temper. How did fear and respect become synonymous?