I find the whole situation of confronting an audience terrifying.
— Sam Shepard
I guess what I like is mostly country & western or else stuff that has a real blues feel to it.
I've been into horses as far back as I can remember. There is a particular kind here in America called the 'quarter horse' that I'm very interested in.
I'm not a big fan of anniversaries.
I'm not denying that it's exciting to have a play on Broadway.
They say TV has a tendency to diminish actors, and I think that's probably true in the long run - it wears on 'em like bad dental work - but Cheech doesn't show any of the signs of being damaged that way. And as a man, he's fantastic.
I think comedy's harder to pull off on the screen than on the stage, anyway. Tragedy is easier on the screen... oddly enough.
It's my private life, and it's not up for grabs.
I feel like the writers that I'm drawn to, the writers that I really cling to, are the writers who seem to be writing out of a desperate act. It's like their writing is part of a survival kit. Those are the writers that I just absolutely cherish and carry with me everywhere I go.
The words I overuse are all adverbs.
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.
I'm a great believer in chaos. I don't believe that you start with a formula and then you fulfill the formula. Chaos is a much better instigator, because we live in chaos - we don't live in a rigorous form.
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.
I think a part of the reason that those early plays were short was that I just kept having these ideas, and I'd just go off and write them. I wasn't trying to write one-act plays - it's just how the ideas would be expressed. Every condition I was in seemed like it could be a play.
I've been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.
Writing for the theatre is so different to writing for anything else. Because what you write is eventually going to be spoken. That's why I think so many really powerful novelists can't write a play - because they don't understand that it's spoken - that it hits the air. They don't get that.
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.
You don't have to do anything in the movies. You just sit there. Well, that's not entirely true. You do less.
More than any other art form I know of in America, country music speaks of the true relationship between the American male and the American female... Terrible and impossible.
I keep endlessly busy with all kinds of stuff, mostly horses, cattle, livestock, things like that.
I'm not put off so much by first-time directors if the script is great. If the script isn't there, I'm not there.
In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man.
When you're 19 and writing plays, you think every actor is full of it. They just can't handle your brilliant material.
I've had it up to my ears with the personal mythology. It's getting kind of personally sickening. The personal stuff just turns out to be misinterpreted. I've had such an earful for so long, it's gotten tedious. I figure if you stay away from it, you're safe.
More than anything, falling in love causes a certain female thing in a man to manifest, oddly enough.
I am always relaxed.
I was shot in the wrist when I was a kid. Deliberately.
I think without writing I would feel completely useless.
I always thought the desert was the antithesis of peace - something that attacks you. So you don't go to the desert for peace.
My son, Walker, has a band called The Dust Busters. You know, he plays banjo, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin, so a lot of my interest in that kind of music comes from him constantly listening to this stuff. He's taught me the history of it. It's remarkable how these young kids are now turned on to more traditional old-time music.
I never considered myself a movie star, and I didn't want to become a movie star, because as soon as you do, you throw away that possibility of playing character. You really do. All of a sudden you're just an entity, you know?
I'm still very much a believer in the spontaneity of certain kinds of writing. But then you have to eventually, when you're writing a long play, make adjustments along the way - all kinds of adjustments.
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.
My old man tried to force on me a notion of what it was to be a 'man.' And it destroyed my dad.
Guys like Clyde McPhatter used to sing their tail ends off!
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, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. My father was full of terrifying anger.
Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not the head. It moves us into an area of mystery.
When I was a kid, we didn't have a TV until the late '50s, but I can remember watching Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Steve McQueen, and 'Gunsmoke.'
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.
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.
If you start trying to figure out yourself from the image everyone has of you, you run into a dead end.
Personality is everything that's false in a human: everything that's been added on to him and contrived.
All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.
I'm inhabiting a life I'm not supposed to be in... and at certain times in my life, I have felt a wrongness. And not a moral wrongness but a sense that this isn't what I was born to be doing.
The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness.
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.
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 you're literally not dependent on anybody.
When I just sit around my house and work, I can work two, three hours, and then I go off and ride a horse or do something that I perceive to be a lot more fun.
The thing about American writers is that, as a group, they get stuck in the same idea: that we're a continent and the world falls away after us. And it's just nonsense.
I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.
