The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Sam Shepard

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.

Fence, You, Divided

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.

Life, Not Knowing, Know

I’m not a big fan of anniversaries.

Big, Fan, Big Fan

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.

Work, Play, You

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.

Music, Balance, Writing

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.

hate, love, lovers

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.

betrayal, hate, love

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.

writers, writing

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.

machine, writers-block, writers-on-writing, writing

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.

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.

children, darkness, fathers

I believe in my mask– The man I made up is meI believe in my dance– And my destiny

disguises, faith, idenity, lies, lying, masks, personality, self-deception