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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

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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
Kinds
Feels
Anybody
Great
Lucky
Branch
Different
Writer
Privileged
Kind
Sense
Prose
Stuff
Branches
Tell
Literally
Stories
Dependent

More quotes by 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.
Sam Shepard
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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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There's gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning.
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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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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I was shot in the wrist when I was a kid. Deliberately.
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I'll develop my own image. I'm an original man. A one and only. I just need some help.
Sam Shepard
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When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in.
Sam Shepard
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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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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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Keep away from fantasy. Shake off the image.
Sam Shepard
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Hollywood is geared toward teenage idiocy.
Sam Shepard
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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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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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It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.
Sam Shepard
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I think without writing I would feel completely useless.
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.
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
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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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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.
Sam Shepard