Sam Shepard (born November 5, 1943, Fort Sheridan, near Highland Park, Illinois, U.S.—died July 27, 2017, Midway, Kentucky) was an American playwright and actor whose plays adroitly blend images of the American West, Pop motifs, science fiction, and other elements of popular and youth culture.
1: “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.”
2: “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.”
3: “I stay away from heavy-handed stuff, the good guy and the bad guy. It just doesn’t interest me; all it does is create more fences between people, I think.”
4: “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.”
5: “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.”
6: “There’s no way to escape the fact that we’ve grown up in a violent culture, we just can’t get away from it, it’s part of our heritage. I think part of it is that we’ve always felt somewhat helpless in the face of this vast continent. Helplessness is answered in many ways, but one of them is violence.”
7: “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.”
8: “My old man tried to force on me a notion of what it was to be a ‘man.’ And it destroyed my dad.”
9: “Personality is everything that’s false in a human: everything that’s been added on to him and contrived.”
10: “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.”
11: “My son, Walker, has a band called The Dust Busters. You know, he plays banjo, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin, so a lot of my interest in that kind of music comes from him constantly listening to this stuff. He’s taught me the history of it. It’s remarkable how these young kids are now turned on to more traditional old-time music.”
12: “I’ve come to feel that if I can’t make something happen in under an hour and a half, it’s not going to happen in a compelling way in a three-hour play.”
13: “I see a lot of scripts, and very few of them leap off the page at you.”
14: “Grief is bizarre territory because there’s no predicting how long it’ll take to get over certain things. You just don’t know how long it’s going to resound in your life.”
15: “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?”
16: “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.”
17: “If you start trying to figure out yourself from the image everyone has of you, you run into a dead end.”
18: “Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it’s physical. You’re also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn’t exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover.”
19: “I always thought the desert was the antithesis of peace – something that attacks you. So you don’t go to the desert for peace.”
20: “It’s very difficult to escape your background. You know, I don’t think it’s necessary to even try to escape it. More and more, I start to think that it’s necessary to see exactly what it is that you inherited on both ends of the stick: your timidity, your courage, your self-deceit, and your honesty – and all the rest of it.”