20 Quotes & Sayings By Sam Shepard

Born in 1943, Sam Shepard was the youngest of nine children. His father, Raymond, ran a gas station and a grocery store in Springfield, Missouri. He became a writer and director of plays. His mother, Mary Jane, was a nurse and taught at the University of Missouri Read more

Sam attended Springfield's Central High School, where he became involved in theater as well as sports. After graduating from high school in 1961, he went to the University of Texas at Austin and became involved with the creative writing program there. He served as creative director for the university's student newspaper and won a scholarship to attend the William Inge Academy of Dramatic Art in New York City.

He dropped out after six months and took a job as an intern at Hill & Knowlton public relations firm. Shepard left New York City for New Mexico, where he met his future wife, actress Jessica Tandy (daughter of Oscar-winning actress Ruby Dee). They married in 1965 and had two sons: Walker (born 1968) and Speed (born 1971).

They divorced in 1972. Shepard returned to New York City to pursue his writing career. In the early 1970s he worked as an actor on Broadway and formed a short-lived theater company called The Rattlestick Players.

In 1977 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant for "creative work that advanced human understanding." In 1978 he received his first Tony Award nomination for Best Play for Buried Child, which was followed by nominations for Best Director and Best Play for True West (1979) and Days Without End (1981). In 1983 he joined the faculty at Yale Drama School as a professor of playwriting. In 1985 he became artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where he directed fourteen plays over five seasons.

He also founded the Center for Fiction at that time and served as its first director. In 1987 his play Fool For Love received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for Best Play. That year also saw the publication of his memoir Personal History: A Memoir by Sam Shepard published by Random House/Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; it was followed by another memoir, True West: A Play About Two Men One Horse And Their Pursuit Of Life's Simple Joys And Pleasures (1989), which was named one of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 1989; The Evening Star (1990), which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award (1990) and Los Angeles Times Award (1990) for fiction; Fool For Love (

I believe in my mask-- The man I made up...
1
I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is me I believe in my dance-- And my destiny Sam Shepard
This isn't champagne anymore. We went through the champagne a...
2
This isn't champagne anymore. We went through the champagne a long time ago. This is serious stuff. The days of champagne are long gone. Sam Shepard
3
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. Sam Shepard
4
When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds. Sam Shepard
5
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. Sam Shepard
6
You can’t keep messing me around like this. It’s been going on too long. I can’t take it anymore. I get sick every time you come around. Then I get sick when you leave. You’re like a disease to me. Sam Shepard
7
You don't have to take it out on my typewrite ya' know. It's not the machine's fault that you can't write. It's a sin to do that to a good machine. Sam Shepard
8
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. Sam Shepard
9
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. Sam Shepard
10
I'm not a big fan of anniversaries. Sam Shepard
11
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. Sam Shepard
12
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. Sam Shepard
13
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. Sam Shepard
14
The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness. Sam Shepard
15
It's funny, in a way the actor is a writer. It's not like the two things are so separate as to be like apples and oranges. The writer and the actor are one. Sam Shepard
16
My father had a real short fuse. He had a tough life - had to support his mother and brother at a very young age when his dad's farm collapsed. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. My father was full of terrifying anger. Sam Shepard
17
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. Sam Shepard
18
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. Sam Shepard
19
My old man tried to force on me a notion of what it was to be a 'man.' And it destroyed my dad. Sam Shepard