Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard
Samuel Shepard Rogers III, known professionally as Sam Shepard, is an American playwright, actor, author, screenwriter, and director, whose body of work spans over half a century. He is the author of forty-four plays as well as several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs. Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth5 November 1943
CountryUnited States of America
Farm country -- you know, hay, horses, cattle. It's the ideal situation for me. I like the physical endeavors that go with the farm -- cutting hay, cleaning out stalls, or building a barn. You go do that and then come back to the writing.
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.
I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.
Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.
Caryl Churchill is a writer of some note, but in the sack, she makes me explain everything.
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.
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.
When you're looking for someone, you're looking for some aspect of yourself, even if you don't know it ... What we're searching for is what we lack.
Keep away from fantasy. Shake off the image,
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.
I think without writing I would feel completely useless.
I've come to feel that if I can't make something happen in under an hour and a half, it's not going to happen in a compelling way in a three-hour play.
We're being sold a brand new idea of patriotism. It never occurred to me that patriotism had to be advertised. Patriotism is something you deeply felt. You didn't have to wear it on your lapel or show it in your window or on a bumper sticker. That kind of patriotism does not appeal to me at all.
There's gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning.