Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

Money is a way of creating scarcity.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.