Sam Shepard

“I'm a great believer in chaos. I don't believe that you start with a formula and then you fulfill the formula. Chaos is a much better instigator, because we live in chaos - we don't live in a rigorous form.”

“Why would you want to be be counseled in your grief? It's too private.”

“You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.”

“My dad was a kind of semiprofessional Dixieland-type drummer, and I learned the drums from him. When I was about twelve, we bought our first Ludwig drum set from a pawnshop - a marching-band bass drum, great big tom-toms, and big, deep snare drums.”

“I've had it up to my ears with the personal mythology. It's getting kind of personally sickening. The personal stuff just turns out to be misinterpreted. I've had such an earful for so long, it's gotten tedious. I figure if you stay away from it, you're safe.”

“Writing for the theatre is so different to writing for anything else. Because what you write is eventually going to be spoken. That's why I think so many really powerful novelists can't write a play - because they don't understand that it's spoken - that it hits the air. They don't get that.”

“Weston: Look at my outlook. You don't envy it, right?Wesley: No.Weston: That's because it's full of poison. Infected. And you recognize poison, right? You recognize it when you see it?Wesley: Yes.Weston: Yes, you do. I can see that you do. My poison scares you.Wesley: Doesn't scare me.Weston: No?Wesley: No.Weston: Good. You're growing up. I never saw my old man's poison until I was much older than you. Much older. And then you know how I recognized it?Wesley: How?Weston: Because I saw myself infected with it. That's how. I saw me carrying it around. His poison in my body.”

“I used to work a lot on ranches where I grew up, and I had to rise at 5:30 in the morning.”

“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.”

“I don't get offered leading parts. I suppose I've become a kind of character actor or sideman. I think it had to do with probably in the '90s, I refused so many leading roles that they gave up on me, or I just became unpopular, or I became old. All those reasons.”

“Hollywood is geared toward teenage idiocy.”

“People are starved for the truth, and when something comes along that even looks like the truth, people will latch onto it because everything's so false.”

“I guess what I like is mostly country & western or else stuff that has a real blues feel to it.”

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

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

“I've always found it embarrassing to receive awards.”

“You don't have to do anything in the movies. You just sit there. Well, that's not entirely true. You do less.”

“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.”

“What I like most about Bolano is his courage.”

“I'm extremely grateful that I found writing, but it doesn't make it any more peaceful.”