Peter Coyote Quotes

I can't go into Oklahoma without thinking about Larry Clark's photography book 'Tulsa.' It's a great book about how life works.

We had been reading about these beatniks who hung out or lived in Greenwich Village, and we wanted to find out what a 'beatnik' was, and so a friend and I went right to the source. What we learned, of course, was that beatniks were mostly artists.

When the punk rock thing happened, I thought, 'Right, I have one chance here to be seen as part of some wider social phenomenon.'

Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie and The Sex Pistols may come and go, but rebellion remains a key part of the rock n' roll experience. However, that rebellion - the outgrowth of a youthful search for independence and identity - doesn't always take the same form.

If you have a counterculture band, you put a name on it, you call them beatniks, and you can sell something - books or bebop. Or you label them as hippies and you can sell tie-dyed T-shirts.

He knew her now. She was the weird girl in the class above him, who dyed her hair pink and always wore a lot of pentragrams and crystals. Right now she was also wearing giant chandelier earings and a violent pink T-Shirt that bore the words ROMEO AND JULIET WOULDN'T HAVE LASTED.

I don't know the difference between a hippie and a hipster but, it's fun to watch either one of them get beat up.

Eh. Hipster's not really a thing anymore. Plus, hipster or out of touch old dude? Same uniform really.

The art school babe quotes William Blake as she rolls a joint, then I think that I'll score.

In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.

Punk and all that was just an image that ripped people off. Johnny Rotten's a wanker, and that's all there is to it.

You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.

We were the chosen rejects. We chose not to be apart of the popular crowd. I mean, I can rember a lot of times the more popular people, the 'jock type' of people who were into sports, and staying clean, and brushing there teeth all the time, they always asked me if I wanted to join their little club, and i decided not to, you know, I would rather hang out with the people who didn't get picked for the baseball team, you know, who smoke cigarettes and listen to rock 'n' roll music.

The punk scene in NY was so gritty and nihilistic & I was like ooh I want to do that

A heroin-thin boy with enough rings in his eyebrows to resemble a shower curtain rod.

You're 28, why are you going to goth clubs? Do what I do, sit at home & wait to die. You don't have to kill yourself, you're just waiting.

This worked out perfectly for me in college, because what nineteen-year-old Virginia boy doesn't want a wide-hipped, sarcastic Greek girl with short hair that's permed on top? What's that you say? None of them want that? You are correct.

I didn't say that wearing a glamorization of the rock artist was any truer from the other thing.

Cliches and stereotypes such as "beatnik" or "hippie" have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term.

The only riot I’m okay with is a zoot suit riot.

The fifties were when people started coming down on "juvenile delinquents," "hoodlums," "vandals"--anybody that was young, wore a motorcycle jacket, and didn't act polite around older people.

He was a punk, she did ballet. What more can I say.

Rap is rock 'n' roll. Rock is when you push the buttons in the system; when you say, I'm not going along with what you're saying. That's rock, whether it's done with guitars, or it's done with just beats.

He doesn’t pretend,” the punk pixie said. He nodded toward Doyle. “Nice rings. You got anything else pierced?” “Yes,” Doyle said. The boy smiled, making the rings in the edge of his nose and his bottom lip curl cheerfully with it. “Me too,” he said.