Peter Coyote

“Acting is the way I make my living.”

“Interdependence is a fact, it's not an opinion.”

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

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

“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.”

“I've always been a writer.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“Money is a way of creating scarcity.”

“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.”

“My house and my garden are built as part of nature, not over it.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”