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
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.
I keep endlessly busy with all kinds of stuff, mostly horses, cattle, livestock, things like that.
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.
I basically live out of my truck - I mean from place to place. I feel more at home in my truck than just about anywhere, which is a sad thing to say, but it's true.
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.
To sit on a ranch horse that's been broken in, it's like getting in a Porsche.
It's my private life, and it's not up for grabs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's no way to escape the fact that we've grown up in a violent culture, we just can't get away from it, it's part of our heritage. I think part of it is that we've always felt somewhat helpless in the face of this vast continent. Helplessness is answered in many ways, but one of them is violence.
There is this aura that the three-act play is the important one: it's the one that you do to win the Pulitzer. Some part of you falls for that, and then after a while, you don't fall for that.
Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not the head. It moves us into an area of mystery.
If you start trying to figure out yourself from the image everyone has of you, you run into a dead end.
I stay away from heavy-handed stuff, the good guy and the bad guy. It just doesn't interest me; all it does is create more fences between people, I think.
I love Levon Helm - he's one of my favorite guys.
I see a lot of scripts, and very few of them leap off the page at you.
I don't attend costume parties.
I've always found it embarrassing to receive awards.
I'm not denying that it's exciting to have a play on Broadway.
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.
It's very difficult to escape your background. You know, I don't think it's necessary to even try to escape it. More and more, I start to think that it's necessary to see exactly what it is that you inherited on both ends of the stick: your timidity, your courage, your self-deceit, and your honesty - and all the rest of it.
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.
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.
Dialogue is like jazz. Dialogue is creative.
I'm not in demand. I'm all washed up.
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'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 remember, as a kid, going into other people's houses. Everything was different. The smells in the kitchen were different; the clothing was different. That bothered me. There's something very mysterious about other families and the way they function.
Sometimes in someone's gestures you can notice how a parent is somehow inhabiting that person without there being any awareness of that. Sometimes you can look at your hand and see your father.
People are starved for the truth, and when something comes along that even looks like the truth, people will latch onto it because everything's so false.
Why would you want to be be counseled in your grief? It's too private.
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?
Personality is everything that's false in a human: everything that's been added on to him and contrived.
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 not put off so much by first-time directors if the script is great. If the script isn't there, I'm not there.
Men lie all the time.
I guess what I like is mostly country & western or else stuff that has a real blues feel to it.
I have a cellphone, but I have no Google, I have no gaggle.
In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man.
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.
I've been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.
I keep my horses out in the open, but when I was working the ranches, I had to clean the stalls. It was a horrible job.
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.
When I first started in film, I was terrified of the camera.
With acting, you can find a way to make it interesting for yourself, if nobody else - even on big-budget films. But you're very much on your own.
I was shot in the wrist when I was a kid. Deliberately.
I don't belong much anywhere.
