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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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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
Firsts
Structure
Play
Beyond
First
Started
Writing
Went
Kind
Sort
Really
Write
Failed
Didn
Wherever
Wanted
Dialogue

More quotes by Sam Shepard

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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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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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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 had a definite sense of somehow being a passenger in an evil vehicle crusing through Paradise.
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She refers to her past as the time before she was blown away.
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I'll develop my own image. I'm an original man. A one and only. I just need some help.
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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 you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in.
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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.
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The words I overuse are all adverbs.
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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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Keep away from fantasy. Shake off the image.
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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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Love is the only disease that makes you feel better.
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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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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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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.
Sam Shepard