Sam Shepard

Playwright

1943-11-05 – 2017-07-27

Sam Shepard was an American playwright, actor, and author known for Buried Child, True West, and Fool for Love. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was also active in film and television.

Books by Sam Shepard

A lie of the mind
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Buried child
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Seven Plays (Buried Child / Curse of the Starving Class / The Tooth of Crime / La Turista / Tongues / Savage Love / True West)
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Quotes by Sam Shepard

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.Weston: Yes, you do. I can see that you do. My poison scares you.Wesley: Doesn't scare me.Weston: No?Wesley: No.Weston: Good. You're growing up. I never saw my old man's poison until I was much older than you. Much older. And then you know how I recognized it?Wesley: How?Weston: Because I saw myself infected with it. That's how. I saw me carrying it around. His poison in my body.
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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.
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I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is meI believe in my dance-- And my destiny
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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.Weston: Yes, you do. I can see that you do. My poison scares you.Wesley: Doesn't scare me.Weston: No?Wesley: No.Weston: Good. You're growing up. I never saw my old man's poison until I was much older than you. Much older. And then you know how I recognized it?Wesley: How?Weston: Because I saw myself infected with it. That's how. I saw me carrying it around. His poison in my body.
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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.
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I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is meI believe in my dance-- And my destiny
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My dad was a kind of semiprofessional Dixieland-type drummer, and I learned the drums from him. When I was about twelve, we bought our first Ludwig drum set from a pawnshop - a marching-band bass drum, great big tom-toms, and big, deep snare drums.
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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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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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Grief is bizarre territory because there's no predicting how long it'll take to get over certain things. You just don't know how long it's going to resound in your life.
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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 theoretical essay, not a play.
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After the falling out with my father, I worked on a couple of ranches - thoroughbred layup farms, actually - out toward Chino, California. That was fine for a little while, but I wanted to get out completely, and twenty miles away wasn't far enough.
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It's very difficult to escape your background. You know, I don't think it's necessary to even try to escape it. More and more, I start to think that it's necessary to see exactly what it is that you inherited on both ends of the stick: your timidity, your courage, your self-deceit, and your honesty - and all the rest of it.
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Democracy's a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it's no longer democracy, is it? It's something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism.
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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.
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The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a craft but as a way into things that are not described. It's a thing of discovering. That's when writing is really working. You're on the trail of something, and you don't quite know what it is.
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I wrote 'Buried Child' in a trailer at an old ranch house we had in California.
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Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn't exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover.
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A good actor always sets you straight. If you've written a false moment and thought it was probably pretty great, the actor's gonna show you when he gets to that moment. They're the great test of the validity of the material.
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I was shot in the wrist when I was a kid. Deliberately.
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