Quotes from Sam Shepard

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

Those are the most monotonous fuckin' crickets I ever heard in my life.

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

When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds.

You can't believe people when they look you in the eyes. You gotta' look behind them. See what they're standing in front of. What they're hiding. Everyone's hiding, Wes. Everybody. Nobody look like what they are.

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

Austin: "Well it is like salvation sort of. I mean the smell. I love the smell of toast. And the sun's coming up. It makes me feel like anything's possible. Y'know?

That's the thing about later. You don't know what's coming up. You don't know how all the loose ends are going to gather together. Something for sure is going to happen but you don't know what it is.

people here have become the people they're pretending to be.

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.

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.

Mi papá vive solo en el desierto. Dice que no se lleva bien con la gente.

There are times when I can't help thinking about the past. I know the present is the place to be. It's always been the place to be. I know I've been recommended by very wise people to stay in the present as much as possible, but the past sometimes presents itself. The past doesn't come as a whole. It always comes in parts.

I'm inhabiting a life I'm not supposed to be in... and at certain times in my life, I have felt a wrongness. And not a moral wrongness but a sense that this isn't what I was born to be doing.

The experience is always different than the plans. The experience was exhausting. I am still exhausted from it.

Give me the keys.

Men combing their hair in cars Men watching their hair in rear-view mirrors Men carrying big black combs in their back pockets Men worried about how Women see them Men turning themselves into advertisements of Men Women wearing boots that make them limp Women watching their eyes don't wander on to the eyes of Men Women worried how Men will see them Women turning themselves into advertisements of Women

and in that wink I understood there might be grown men in this world who actually get a spark out of life.

I've been my own man. Ain't nothing richer than that

I've always found it embarrassing to receive awards.

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

When you're 19 and writing plays, you think every actor is full of it. They just can't handle your brilliant material.

I don't believe in a lot of schmoozing and buttering up. Not that you don't become friends in work. But I think it's a misconception that you have to do a lot of hanging before you work.

I stay away from heavy-handed stuff, the good guy and the bad guy. It just doesn't interest me; all it does is create more fences between people, I think.