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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.

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
Start
Talk
Voice
Didn
Discovering
Problem
Voices
Many
Writers
Writing
Wasn
Heard

More quotes by Sam Shepard

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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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My dad's side of the family ... they're a real bizarre bunch, going back to the original colonies. That side's got a real tough strain of alcoholism. It goes back generations and generations, so that you can't remember when there was a sober grandfather.
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I feel very lucky and privileged to be a writer. I feel lucky in the sense that I can branch out into prose and tell different kinds of stories and stuff. But being a writer is so great because youre literally not dependent on anybody.
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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.
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When you're looking for someone, you're looking for some aspect of yourself, even if you don't know it ... What we're searching for is what we lack.
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I had a definite sense of somehow being a passenger in an evil vehicle crusing through Paradise.
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Hollywood is geared toward teenage idiocy.
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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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Ive been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.
Sam Shepard
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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.
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The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness.
Sam Shepard
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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.
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Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.
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I like cars. I like travel. I like the idea of people breaking down and I'm the only one who can help them get on the road again. It would be like being a magician. Just open up the hood and cast your magic spell.
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I think without writing I would feel completely useless.
Sam Shepard
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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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In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man. The purpose of it, of course, was to write about myself. That character was always the least fully realized. Eighteen years later, you realize, That's what he was about.
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When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in.
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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.
Sam Shepard
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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