53 Quotes by Peter Coyote

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.