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

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

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

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

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

Money is a way of creating scarcity.

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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