Sam Shepard - biography

Biography

Sam Shepard is best-known for the following films:

Resurrection (1980)

Sam Shepard Quotes

“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.”

“It’s all about narcissism. Terry Malick called it ‘sanctioned vanity’. Everything is attended to. Would you like some Perrier? Anything we can do? May we throw ourselves on the ground in front of you? This unbelievable barrage of indulgence.”

“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.”

“I was on different drugs - crystal Methedrine, which had more of an edge. When you walked down the streets, your heels made sparks.”

“I feel like I’ve never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don’t know exactly where I fit in... There’s always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself.”

“Personality is everything that’s false in a human, everything that’s been added to him and contrived.”

“I didn’t go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.”

“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.”

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

“Collaboration - that’s the word producers use. That means, ‘don’t forget to kiss ass from beginning to end’.”

“It was very contagious, this feeling that in order to be a true, honest, heroic artist you had to do yourself in or go bananas, so that your insanity became a badge of honour. I knew guys who walked off roofs.”

“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.”

Filmography

The Actor