John Waters Quotes

I make a great part of my living by traveling and speaking. To me, it's like being a politician, you meet your audience, you constantly see the people and they're getting younger for me which is really, really encouraging. I get older and my audience gets younger. It couldn't be better.

Life is a rotten lottery.

I didn't become a drug addict because I always had to make a movie.

The only time I had a normal boyfriend was during the time of AIDS, so maybe that saved me. It's certainly not karma.

I'm certainly not going to tell other people what they should do with their own personal lives. I think it's certainly easier for a director to be out. The public is not going to see a movie because the director is gay or straight. It's maybe a little harder for an actor or actress because of, you know, the love roles and stuff. But gay people have been impersonating heteros in the movies for years. So, hopefully, that is becoming less of an issue. I think it would have been really great if a gay person had played a gay person. That's brave!

I probably would have made [films] anywhere. Every city has something they're ashamed of. I would have made films about it and turned it into something positive.

I like art that challenges you and makes a lot of people angry because they don't get it. Because they refuse to look at it properly. Rather than open their mind to the possibility of seeing something, they just resist. A lot of people think contemporary art makes them feel stupid. Because they are stupid. They're right. If you have contempt about contemporary art, you are stupid. You can be the most uneducated person in the world and completely appreciate contemporary art, because you see the rebellion. You see that it's trying to change things.

I think that's why I've lasted this long because I love everything I make fun of! I make fun of myself first! I mean, I started my career by calling my films "trash" - the local critics used to complain that I beat the critic to the typewriter.

I could never kill myself. I approve of suicide if you have horrible health. Otherwise it's the ultimate hissy fit.

My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior - before the Reformation.

I think middle America has changed very, very much. I think people are way more open-minded. I think - I think it's because the Internet. I think they're exposed to so much. All the men talked about how much they love their wife, which I don't hear all the time in art communities.

I live in San Francisco, I live in Provincetown. They're all the same, apart from Baltimore. Baltimore's the only cheap place left.

Irony ruined everything Even the best exploitation movies were never meant to be `so bad they were good`. They were not made for the intelligentsia. They were made to be violent for real, or to be sexy for real. But now everybody has irony. Even horror films now are ironic. Everybody's in on the joke now. Everybody's hip. Nobody takes anything at face value anymore.

Wouldn't you rather your kid be a drug dealer than a drug addict?

The "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" hitchhiker really made people never want to hitchhike again - the hitcher, the show. Hitchhiking is always vaguely sexual.

The Easter Bunny is a major reason for heroin addiction in America.

I want to be harder to reach, not easier.

There is still such a thing as subversive. Subversive makes hip people nervous. It's something new that scares you in a good way. I mean, subversive to me is a compliment. Subversive is something that influences people to do something against society that they haven't thought of before.

When I started my goal was to make a successful underground movie. I started making movies in the mid-60s. Underground cinema then only lasted about two or three years.

My idea of rich is that you can buy every book you ever want without looking at the price and you're never around assholes. That's the two things to really fight for in life.

I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.

Censorship has been my best press agent my whole life.

I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty.

It took me a while to figure it out, but to have a real hit on Broadway, you have to get the respected Broadway people to like it. But then the production also has to appeal to the most middle-class people who know nothing about Broadway and who come to see it later.

I have to talk about my movies. I have to give interviews to promote what I'm doing. But no one really knows my personal life. And if you don't have a personal life I feel bad for you.

I think [parents] became very proud, even though they were mortified by the early films because no one liked them.

Nothing is more impotent than an unread library.

New York was the last place that my movies caught on. I didn't make underground movies in New York, and in the 1960s, they were very snobby about that, because the whole scene was here.

I never rewatch the great films of my favorite directors because I'm afraid they won't hold up.

Even illegal weapons have lost their panache. Zip guns and shanks were at least homemade. Where is the craft in a grade-schooler firing a magnum? What is the world coming to? It's not even bad to be a communist anymore!

No comedy should be longer than 90 minutes. There's no such thing as a good long joke.

Hitchhiking, intrinsically, is sexual and dangerous. At the same time I never really felt scared. I was scared that nobody would pick me up and that I'd be waiting by the side of the road for a week.

If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that.

If you want to be an artist, go to every art gallery, if you want to be in movies, see movies! You have to participate in whichever world you're trying to enter! You have to know what's going on. You can be the best artist in the world but if you don't know one thing about which gallery to go to, you're never going to get it shown in the right place. Learn a little bit about the business of whichever art you're trying to get into. Without it, you will be lost.

And I seek people who break rules with happiness — and not bringing pain to themselves.

Anytime you make someone laugh or satirize something, it's the best way to change someone's opinion because they're defenseless - they laugh, they listen.

I'd love to sell out completely. It's just that nobody has been willing to buy.

I learned that people like my work because I praise things that others don't like.

I keep very close in touch with the fans - to see what they like. I'm very in touch with my audience; I get older and they get younger, which I think is the ultimate compliment. I think hitchhiking brought a few of them out! Even though all young people have never hitchhiked, all people my age did at one point in their life, they just don't do it now.

Yeah, I know I should be fighting for gay rights, but who wants to join the army or get married anyway?

Watching a movie should be like hunting. Out of context, every image of the cinema is yours for a split second. Take them before they bury it.

People still come to Baltimore and say, "I didn't realize you made documentaries."

My films can be considered political action against the tyranny of good taste.

I do like Christmas. I do understand that there are people who hate it, and there are other religions that resent it. So, I speak to everybody - I try to speak to every kind of minority and majority that cannot escape the steamroller known as Christmas.

I actually think that my films are intellectual. I think almost everything I do is intellectual, but I would never say that, because that's a compliment. That's up to others to say about me. The same way, I would never say I do art. I think art is up to history. It's up to other people to utter that word. So I try to be humble.

Coke didn't last long enough; it gave me a hangover for two weeks for being high for ten minutes.

My idea of an interesting person is someone who is quite proud of their seemingly abnormal life and turns their disadvantage into a career.

Many hundred-million-dollar Hollywood comedies aren't any good. They're trying to shock you.