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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.

Sam Shepard

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Sam Shepard
Age: 73 †
Born: 1943
Born: November 5
Died: 2017
Died: July 27
Actor
Author
Autobiographer
Dramaturge
Film Actor
Film Director
Percussionist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Theatrical Director
Fort Sheridan
Illinois
Samuel Shepard Rogers III
Samuel Sam Shepard Rogers III
Crosses
Places
Interested
Acting
Writing
Divisions
Way
Division
Things
Crafts
Cross

More quotes by Sam Shepard

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I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.
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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.
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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.
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People talk about the 1960s in a nostalgic way, but to me it was terrifying. People were getting assassinated. There was Vietnam. There were race riots. It felt like everything was going to get blown up sky-high. It didn’t feel like flower power. It felt like Armageddon.
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When you die it's the end of your life.
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The words I overuse are all adverbs.
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I think without writing I would feel completely useless.
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All that stuff about my father and my childhood is interesting up to a certain point, but I kind of capsized with the family drama a long time ago. Now I want to get away from that. Not that I won't return to it, but a certain element has been exhausted, and it feels like why regurgitate all this stuff?
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Ive been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.
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When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in.
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When you see the way things deteriorate before your very eyes. Everything running down hill. It's kind of silly to even think about youth.
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It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.
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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.
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I've heard writers talk about discovering a voice, but for me that wasn't a problem. There were so many voices that I didn't know where to start.
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Hollywood is geared toward teenage idiocy.
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She refers to her past as the time before she was blown away.
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I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.
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When I first started, I didn't really know how to structure a play. I could write dialogue, but I just sort of failed beyond that, and kind of went wherever I wanted to go.
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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.
Sam Shepard
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Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.
Sam Shepard