220 Quotes by Sam Shepard

When I just sit around my house and work, I can work two, three hours, and then I go off and ride a horse or do something that I perceive to be a lot more fun.

When you write a play, you work out like a musician on a piece of music. You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come.

I've been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.

The thing about American writers is that, as a group, they get stuck in the same idea: that we're a continent and the world falls away after us. And it's just nonsense.

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'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.

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?

In the original New York production, which I directed, I had the good fortune to encounter a bluegrass group called the Red Clay Ramblers, out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Their musical sensibilities, musicianship, and great repertoire of traditional and original tunes fit the play like a glove.

Honesty and courage. Also, neither of them can sing a lick. She'll be the first to admit she can't carry a melody line.