Quotes from Sam Shepard

I love Levon Helm - he's one of my favorite guys.

It's very difficult to escape your background. You know, I don't think it's necessary to even try to escape it. More and more, I start to think that it's necessary to see exactly what it is that you inherited on both ends of the stick: your timidity, your courage, your self-deceit, and your honesty - and all the rest of it.

For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.

Love is the only disease that makes you feel better.

I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself.

I am always relaxed.

I'm a writer. The more I act, the more resistance I have to it. If you accept work in a movie, you accept to be entrapped for a certain part of time, but you know you're getting out. I'm also earning enough to keep my horses, buying some time to write.

I keep my horses out in the open, but when I was working the ranches, I had to clean the stalls. It was a horrible job.

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.

People are starved for a way of life - they're hunting for a way to be or to act toward the world.

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

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 you're literally not dependent on anybody.

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

Hollywood is geared toward teenage idiocy.

It's very easy to lose language - it can be shut off in a second.

When you listen intensely to anything, you see how it can be improved.

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 think comedy's harder to pull off on the screen than on the stage, anyway. Tragedy is easier on the screen... oddly enough.

The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a craft but as a way into things that are not described. It's a thing of discovering. That's when writing is really working. You're on the trail of something, and you don't quite know what it is.

I wrote 'Buried Child' in a trailer at an old ranch house we had in California.

I try not to be in situations where I'm being grabbed at. For the most part, you can avoid them.

I feel like I'm a natural-born playwright, but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?

My father had a real short fuse. He had a tough life - had to support his mother and brother at a very young age when his dad's farm collapsed. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. My father was full of terrifying anger.

My son, Walker, has a band called The Dust Busters. You know, he plays banjo, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin, so a lot of my interest in that kind of music comes from him constantly listening to this stuff. He's taught me the history of it. It's remarkable how these young kids are now turned on to more traditional old-time music.