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I think without writing I would feel completely useless.

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
Feel
Feels
Writing
Would
Think
Thinking
Useless
Completely
Without

More quotes by Sam Shepard

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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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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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Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
Sam Shepard
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There's gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning.
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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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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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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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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.
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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The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness.
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The words I overuse are all adverbs.
Sam Shepard
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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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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 got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.
Sam Shepard
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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.
Sam Shepard