220 Quotes by Sam Shepard

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.

In real life we don't know what's going to happen next. So how can you be that way on a stage? Being alive to the possibility of not knowing exactly how everything is going to happen next - if you can find places to have that happen onstage, it can resonate with an experience of living.

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.

My old man tried to force on me a notion of what it was to be a 'man.' And it destroyed my dad.

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

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

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.

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.

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