Quotes from 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.