Sam Shepard

“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 see a lot of scripts, and very few of them leap off the page at you.”

“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.”

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

“I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is meI believe in my dance-- And my destiny”

“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.”

“You sometimes use the excuse, 'I'm a writer, dammit, I can do anything I want,' but that doesn't work.”

“A lot of American playwrights seem to have a career as a playwright. I don't consider it a career at all.”

“A good actor always sets you straight. If you've written a false moment and thought it was probably pretty great, the actor's gonna show you when he gets to that moment. They're the great test of the validity of the material.”

“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 dad had a lot of bad luck. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one.”

“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.”

“All good writing comes out of aloneness.”

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

“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.”

“I don't understand my feelings. I really don't. I don't understand how I could hate you so much after so much time. How, no matter how much I'd like to not hate you, I hate you even more. It grows.”

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

“I've been into horses as far back as I can remember. There is a particular kind here in America called the 'quarter horse' that I'm very interested in.”

“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.”

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