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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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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
Nobody
Play
Writing
Messes
Spoiled
Plays
Mess
Exactly
Theater

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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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I had a definite sense of somehow being a passenger in an evil vehicle crusing through Paradise.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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When you die it's the end of your life.
Sam Shepard
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I'm a writer. The more I act, the more resistance I have to it. If you accept work in a movie, you accept to be entrapped for a certain part of time, but you know you're getting out. I'm also earning enough to keep my horses, buying some time to write.
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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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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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.
Sam Shepard
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Words are tools of imagery in motion.
Sam Shepard
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I think without writing I would feel completely useless.
Sam Shepard