Peter Coyote Quotes & Sayings

We spend all this energy keeping our lives normal and safe and predictable, and the result is that our approved cultural safety valve is the movies. So in films, anyway, the hero is obliged to represent the continuance of social values and institutions, and his permission to act is much more seriously limited than the villain's. — Peter Coyote

One of the most treasured books that I own is Donald Allen's 'The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.' It was a totem of great importance and potency to my group of writer friends in college from 1960 to 1964. — Peter Coyote

The terrible thing about being an actor is that it's not a solo occupation. — Peter Coyote

I believe that when you're wrong, own it and apologize, and so I do and put it on the equivalent of my front page. — Peter Coyote

Everyone knows that our current system is kind of like legalized prostitution. The corporate sector completely controls the civic sector. — Peter Coyote

Acting is the way I make my living. — Peter Coyote

We're the gentle people, sweetheart. We're the losers!...it's what makes us stronger, in a way. — Peter Coyote

My dad was a very violent, frightening and dangerous guy. Next to him, I was this vague kind of kid who walked around, as I still do, gathering impressions. — Peter Coyote

The first time I read something, I have this special feeling of being fully engaged with it. It's fresh to the audience because it's fresh to me. It's a little mystical, but I really believe that. — Peter Coyote

Where I didn't have the maturity and the compassion to consider other people's needs, I did a lot of damage. — Peter Coyote

I am fascinated by women. They're as close as we men get to experiencing 'the other.' The challenge for me was to know and accept fully formed, powerful women. — Peter Coyote

There has to be that feeling in a good villain - that he's awesome, he has his own power; that he is, in several senses, unstoppable. — Peter Coyote

Once you accept anything as tacked down, then you begin to build a structure, to accept limits. Then you have to make a choice as to whether or not you're going to accept that structure. If you do, you give up the notion of total freedom. — Peter Coyote

You don't see artists sitting around a lot, talking about ideology. They find out what they believe, and what they're doing, by doing it. — Peter Coyote

When I was young and growing up in New York, my parents took me to children's theater quite often - elaborate presentations of 'Goldilocks' and 'Rapunzel' for Upper East Side kids. As I grew older, they took me to adult theater, mostly musicals. — Peter Coyote

I think the '60s were an extraordinary time. I feel bad for the kids today who missed this wonderful confluence, which was simultaneously a confluence of the global and the mythological. — Peter Coyote

The self is just not a worthy enough vehicle to worship. — Peter Coyote

Kennedy invited us into the White House-the first time in the history of the White House picketers had been invited inside. This made front page headlines. — Peter Coyote

Phil Cousineau has created a fine companion book to accompany the important film he and Gary Rhine have made in defense of the religious traditions of Native Americans. [Native Americans] are recognized the world over as keepers of a vital piece of the Creator's original orders, and yet they are regarded as little more than squatters at home. This book features impressive interviews, beautiful illustrations, and gives a voice to the voiceless. — Peter Coyote

I think it's good that people value their bodies and take care of them. I think if you cross the line and begin using your body as an asset or as an extension of your vanity, you've gone too far. — Peter Coyote

Habitat for wildlife is continually shrinking - I can at least provide a way station. — Peter Coyote

When you break the rules and you win, you're a hero; when you lose, you're scurrilous. — Peter Coyote

In 1972, Texaco Oil Company, in partnership with PetroEcuador, the state-run oil company of Ecuador, began to drill for oil in the jungles of the Ecuadorian Amazon. — Peter Coyote

I got out of college and I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State. I was working as an actor at the Actor's Workshop, being abused as a intern. — Peter Coyote

People call me a movie star. If you're in the business, a movie star is someone who can make a film bankable. My name and $6 million will make a $6 million movie. I'm a working actor. Because I started late, I had a very short run as a leading man, and my films didn't make money in America. — Peter Coyote

My house and my garden are built as part of nature, not over it. — Peter Coyote

Any political agenda and organization which doesn't begin with personal responsibility is just half the argument. It's just not going to succeed. — Peter Coyote

When I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State after Grinnell, I joined the moribund remnants of the Actor's Workshop, until I saw Kay Hayward and Sandy Archer in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and drove down that day to audition. The rest is history. — Peter Coyote

I've always been a writer. — Peter Coyote

The idea of absolute freedom is fiction. It's based on the idea of an independent self. But in fact, there's no such thing. There's no self without other people. There's no self without sunlight. There's no self without dew. And water. And bees to pollinate the food that we eat ... So the idea of behaving in a way that doesn't acknowledge those reciprocal relationships is not really freedom, it's indulgence. — Peter Coyote

I would say 90 percent of my mail and phone calls are from people who want some kind of help or succor or commitment from me to do something. — Peter Coyote

Hindsight has taught me that there is a ravenous, invisible twin haunting each of us. Despite "good works" and selfless sacrifice for noble causes, without unremitting vigilance, even tiny indulgences will betray high aims and deflect nourishment to this parasitic companion. Unfortunately, not even hindsight frees us from the consequences of such indulgence. Emmett — Peter Coyote

In 2001, Texaco was bought by Chevron, and during deliberations concerning that sale, an 800 page document listing the problems and liabilities connected to Texaco was brought forward at their stockholder meeting by Amazon Watch, a non-profit dedicated to protecting the Amazon. — Peter Coyote

The body is an inviolable limit. And you have to really hurt it before you know that. — Peter Coyote

We put on shows at Golden Gate Park with the Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and the groups were part of the community they emerged out of, not some superstars. We had multiple stages, diversions, communal entertainment. There is something slightly fascistic about sitting in a huge auditorium focusing all the energy on one group far away on stage. — Peter Coyote

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young," [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture - the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of 'the wild' from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. 'Deranging the senses' was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.

"Today," he continued, "the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity. — Peter Coyote

[I]t is the folly of a young man to believe that he can pick and choose between what Love and Power offer him, keeping only the Light and leaving behind the Shadows. — Peter Coyote

If success could heal, why do so many celebrity marriages end in divorce and celebrated artists wind up in rehab or the morgue? Why do people with a firm grip on the world's tail take their own lives or pursue suicidally risky behaviors? — Peter Coyote

It came home to me indelibly that I was never going to change anything in America by walking around carrying a sign. It was a great revelation. It saved me a lot of anxiety and a lot of wasted energy. — Peter Coyote

Business is a subset of the environment, not the other way around. You can't have a healthy economy, you can't have a healthy anything in a degraded environment. — Peter Coyote

Young people, for whom I should have been a role model and an uncle, duplicated my worst habits and died as a result. — Peter Coyote

My gift seems to be that I am able to tell a story in a comprehensible and engaging way. — Peter Coyote

I think you have a social responsibility as the villain, which is pretty different from the hero's responsibility. If you have any kind of a social or political conscience at all, the first thing you want to do is make malevolence recognizable to people, almost as a kind of teaching aid. — Peter Coyote

Writing is something I can do by myself. — Peter Coyote

people astray and into potentially horrific acts. Both of these views relate to the world that is delivered to us by our senses. There is a third way that Buddhist practitioners know as "Emptiness." This is the unseen, formless energy that extrudes itself as the myriad forms of the world, creating and then retrieving them back to the source. Suzuki Roshi suggested that we think of it as the white screen in a movie theater, the unseen background against which the shimmering movie of — Peter Coyote

When I got to Grinnell College, I was part of the black turtleneck sweater and Camel cigarette crowd of poets and writers. — Peter Coyote

Interdependence is a fact, it's not an opinion. — Peter Coyote

Money is a way of creating scarcity. — Peter Coyote