Quotes by Sam Shepard

“This isn't champagne anymore. We went through the champagne a long time ago. This is serious stuff. The days of champagne are long gone.”

“I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is meI believe in my dance-- And my destiny”

“Weston: Look at my outlook. You don't envy it, right?Wesley: No.Weston: That's because it's full of poison. Infected. And you recognize poison, right? You recognize it when you see it?Wesley: Yes.W...”

“I don't understand my feelings. I really don't. I don't understand how I could hate you so much after so much time. How, no matter how much I'd like to not hate you, I hate you even more. It grows.”

“You cant keep messing me around like this. Its been going on too long. I cant take it anymore. I get sick every time you come around. Then I get sick when you leave. Youre like a disease to me.”

“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. Toil...”

“You don't have to take it out on my typewrite ya' know. It's not the machine's fault that you can't write. It's a sin to do that to a good machine.”

“For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a the...”

“When you write a play, you work out like a musician on a piece of music. You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come.”

“I'm not a big fan of anniversaries.”

“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 ...”

“Sides are being divided now. It's very obvious. So if you're on the other side of the fence, you're suddenly anti-American. It's breeding fear of being on the wrong side.”

“On stage, you're not limited at all because you're free in language: language is the source of the imagination. You can travel farther in language than you can in any film.”

“The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness.”

“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.”

“My father had a real short fuse. He had a tough life - had to support his mother and brother at a very young age when his dad's farm collapsed. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, ...”

“I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a plac...”

“My dad had a lot of bad luck. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one.”

“My old man tried to force on me a notion of what it was to be a 'man.' And it destroyed my dad.”

“This isn't champagne anymore. We went through the champagne a long time ago. This is serious stuff. The days of champagne are long gone.”