Top 60 Sam Shepard Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in.”

— Sam Shepard

2. “Everyone wants a piece of land. It’s the only sure investment. It can never depreciate like a car or a washing machine. Land will double its value in ten years. In less than that. Land is going up every day.”

— Sam Shepard

3. “Love is the only disease that makes you feel better.”

— Sam Shepard

4. “I believe in my mask – The man I made up is me I believe in my dance – And my destiny.”

— Sam Shepard

5. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

6. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

7. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

8. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

9. “Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.”

— Sam Shepard

10. “There’s gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning.”

— Sam Shepard

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

— Sam Shepard

12. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

13. “Character is an essential tendency. It can be covered up, it can be messed with, it can be screwed around with, but it can’t be ultimately changed. It’s the structure of our bones, the blood that runs through our veins.”

— Sam Shepard

14. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

15. “When you die it’s the end of your life.”

— Sam Shepard

16. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

17. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

18. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

19. “Hollywood is geared toward teenage idiocy.”

— Sam Shepard

20. “I don’t want to be a playwright, I want to be a rock and roll star.”

— Sam Shepard

21. “I’ve heard writers talk about “discovering a voice,” but for me that wasn’t a problem. There were so many voices that I didn’t know where to start.”

— Sam Shepard

22. “I’ll develop my own image. I’m an original man. A one and only. I just need some help.”

— Sam Shepard

23. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

24. “I like cars. I like travel. I like the idea of people breaking down and I’m the only one who can help them get on the road again. It would be like being a magician. Just open up the hood and cast your magic spell.”

— Sam Shepard

25. “It’s one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.”

— Sam Shepard

26. “There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing. I’m not so interested in the divisions. I’m interested in the way things cross over.”

— Sam Shepard

27. “Caryl Churchill is a writer of some note, but in the sack, she makes me explain everything.”

— Sam Shepard

28. “I’ve been my own man. Ain’t nothing richer than that.”

— Sam Shepard

29. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

30. “To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I’m not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you’re after is the same thing.”

— Sam Shepard

31. “I had a definite sense of somehow being a passenger in an evil vehicle crusing through Paradise.”

— Sam Shepard

32. “So they take off after each other straight into an endless black prairie. The sun is just comin’ down and they can feel the night on their backs. What they don’t know is that each one of ‘em is afraid, see. Each one separately thinks that he’s the only one that’s afraid. And they keep ridin’ like that straight into the night. Not knowing. And the one who’s chasin’ doesn’t know where the other one is taking him. And the one who’s being chased doesn’t know where he’s going.”

— Sam Shepard

33. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

34. “I was in the war. I know how to kill. I was over there. I know how to do it. I’ve done it before. It’s no big deal. You just make an adjustment. You convince yourself it’s all right. That’s all. It’s easy. You just slaughter them.”

— Sam Shepard

35. “The words I overuse are all adverbs.”

— Sam Shepard

36. “You can’t make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.”

— Sam Shepard

37. “VINCE: We’d never make it. We’d drive and we’d drive and we’d drive and we’d never make it. We’d think we were getting farther and farther away. That’s what we’d think.”

— Sam Shepard

38. “She refers to her past as the time before she was “blown away.”

— Sam Shepard

39. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

40. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

41. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

42. “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 youre literally not dependent on anybody.”

— Sam Shepard

43. “Being a writer is so great because you’re literally not dependent on anybody. Whereas, as an actor, you have to audition or wait for somebody else to make a decision about how to use you, with writing, you can do it anywhere, anytime you want. You don’t have to ask permission.”

— Sam Shepard

44. “There are times when I can’t help thinking about the past. I know the present is the place to be. It’s always been the place to be. I know I’ve been recommended by very wise people to stay in the present as much as possible, but the past sometimes presents itself. The past doesn’t come as a whole. It always comes in parts.”

— Sam Shepard

45. “Austin: “Well it is like salvation sort of. I mean the smell. I love the smell of toast. And the sun’s coming up. It makes me feel like anything’s possible. Y’know?”

— Sam Shepard

46. “Ive been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.”

— Sam Shepard

47. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

48. “In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man. The purpose of it, of course, was to write about myself. That character was always the least fully realized. Eighteen years later, you realize, That’s what he was about.”

— Sam Shepard

49. “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.”

— Sam Shepard

50. “I’m a writer. The more I act, the more resistance I have to it. If you accept work in a movie, you accept to be entrapped for a certain part of time, but you know you’re getting out. I’m also earning enough to keep my horses, buying some time to write.”

— Sam Shepard