Sam Shepard Quotes

I was different on drugs - crystal Methedrine, which had more of an edge. When you walked down the street, your heels made sparks.

Collaboration - that`s the word producers use. That means, don`t forget to kiss ass from beginning to end.

I didn`t go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.

(On working in films) "It`s all about narcissism. Terrence Malick called it `sanctioned vanity`. Everything is attended to. Would you like some Perrier? Anything we can do? May we throw ourselves on the ground in front of you? This unbelievable barrage of indulgence".

You`re still much more afraid of the audience, and yet, on the other hand, you desperately want to plunge into new territory. So every once in a while, the opportunity to make this leap gets handed to you. It`s like jumping into cold water.

Hollywood is geared toward teenage idiocy.

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 didn`t go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.

Democracy`s a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it`s no longer democracy, is it? It`s something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism.

There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing. I`m not so interested in the divisions. I`m interested in the way things cross over.

Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play.

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.

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

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.

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

You can`t make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.

The people the critics write for aren`t important to me. As far as I`m concerned, Broadway just doesn`t exist. Quoted in the August, 1970 issue of Playboy (page 19).

I`m not in demand. I`m all washed up.

Don`t you find it kind of self-indulgent for actors to go around writing parts for themselves?