Top 349 Quotes & Sayings by John Waters - Page 4

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.

My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior - before the Reformation.

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.

I'm always amazed at friends who say they try to read at night in bed but always end up falling asleep. I have the opposite problem. If a book is good I can't go to sleep, and stay up way past my bedtime, hooked on the writing. Is anything better than waking up after a late-night read and diving right back into the plot before you even get out of bed to brush your teeth?

I was thinking about sort of the similarities between "art movies" and lowbrow movies like kitschy sexploitation films. I think they share certain qualities, whether they're hyper-stylized or overly emotive or just very visual.

Everybody should wish they had home movies of themselves, acting out their lunacy on LSD.

Anyone from my past I'm interested in, I've already stalked their homes. I like to go outside.

God knows if you could start a new sex act that's more important than making a good movie.

People who want to act rich when they're upper-middle class. They try too hard.

Contemporary art hates you.

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

I went to the Vatican once - it was a bad idea. I went into the bookshop and I bought hideous, pious postcards and then I asked for a receipt, and the nun said, "We don't give receipts at the Vatican." Which threw me into a rage of like, "I guess not, so you can take this money and funnel it into anti-homosexual groups!" People had to drag me out of there. It's not good for me to go into the Vatican.

There are little things that get on my nerves, like people who have reading material in their powder room. When you go in someone’s house, and next to the toilet they have a huge basket of magazines, I find that repellent. I recommend against straining while reading.

The further away I am from water, the less well I do!

My photographs are not really about photography. They are about editing. I use photography but they are all taken from the TV screen. Anybody can do that, but it's the order I put the pictures in to try to create a new kind of movie, something that you can put on your wall.

I'm not a separatist, I'm friends with some people who voted for Trump, not many. Nobody has the nerve to tell me, but a few have.

I would describe myself as a writer that hopes to take you into my world and help you feel a little safer.

There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square.

The worst thing you can do is make a cult movie. That means you got three great reviews and nobody went. An art film means it got a lot of good reviews and nobody went. There is no such thing as a counter culture now. What used to be considered that is commercial now.

I've signed peoples' parole cards at book signings and it's very touching.

I'm the smartest at 8 A.M. I wake up at 6, drink three cups of Awake Tazo Tea and read five newspapers. I have to think up something every day, Monday to Friday.

To use bad taste, you have to know the rules of good taste. I've always thanked my mother for that. She taught how to eat with proper table manners and all that stuff, to the point of rebellion. But I couldn't have rebelled from it if I didn't know it.

A psychiatrist once told me early in treatment, "Stop trying to make me like you," and what a sobering and welcome smack in the face that statement was. Yet somehow, every day of my life is still a campaign for popularity, or better yet, a crowded funeral.

To me, racist jokes are not funny. I am politically correct, in a weird way. I like to push the boundaries that are politically correct.

I always feel bad when I meet celebrities and I can just tell every single thing about their personal life, I just say, "Well, they don't have friends. Or a therapist." Once you have both, you don't have to share everything with people, because then you don't have a private life, and then you're, I guess, a workaholic.

You have to think of a new way to completely surprise people who think they're hip. I always said you could make an NC-17 movie with no sex and no violence. Now I don't know what that could possibly be, but if you could think it up, you'd have a hit.

I never had any desire to get a tattoo. If I was ever going to get one, I would get a plain anchor with a rope around it, the most unimaginative possible tattoo, like Popeye had.

Things are going great in every part of my life except movies. That's okay. I've got a lot of other parts of my life. I've made 15 movies. You can see any one of my movies and it says the same thing.

I think the extremes are something that's really interesting to see coalesce in movies.

It's been 50 years since I was on the roof of my parents' house shooting Hag in a Black Leather Jacket when I didn't even know there was such a thing as editing. I thought you just shot the film and showed it. That's exactly what I did. I'm not that different 50 years later.

Valentine's Day is my mother's birthday. If I'm wildly in love, I've sent people chicken hearts, which seems to appeal to the kind of person that I've been in love with.

What happened is that in the middle of my life I went away and in my own sense of hubris, pride, cynicism, thought, I am an autonomous being in the world, I can control things, I am God.' But my experiment at being God failed! And they do have a great saying in AA: 'Get down off the cross, we need the wood!' And the important thing is to realise you are not the centre of the universe, you are not God.

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.

If I died tomorrow I've accomplished what I set out to do in my life. I enjoy making my movies, I enjoy doing what I do. I have a nice life.

My favorite characters are people who think they're normal but they're not. I live in Baltimore, and it's full of people like that. I've also lived in New York, which is full of people who think they're crazy, but they're completely normal.

You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book.

Well cult is a word you would never say in Hollywood. In any film business, if you're trying to get your next film made, you would never say, "Oh, my last film was a cult film." I'd say, "Oh great, well I hope this one isn't!"

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 don't like heroin, unless you're a jazz musician and then you have to be on it because jazz is the sound of heroin.

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

I have no interest in cars. I have a plain, used Buick. I could run over 10 people, and you wouldn't be able to describe my car.

I'm here today because of LSD. LSD gave me the confidence to be who I am today. Completely.

I built a career on negative reviews. I didn't get a good review ever until Fran Lebowitz gave me a good review in Interview. That was the first good review I got in 10 years.

Insider can be more ludicrous. How did I ever end up [as one]? Carsick [Waters's book on hitchhiking] was on the New York Times best-seller list for five weeks. [One of the characters was] a singing asshole that does a duet with Connie Francis! Times have changed. That's mainstream, in a weird way.

I respect everything I make fun of.

I don't believe in depression. There's no such thing. It's an invention. It's bullshit, it's a cop out.

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.

It reinforced everything that I believe. I am an optimist. I believe in the goodness of people.

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

...Don't let me ever hear you say, 'I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth.' Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of 'literature'? That means fiction, too, stupid.

An underground hit didn't make any money and it cost a dollar to get in.

I care about the presidential elections. I always vote. Sometimes I've voted more than once, illegally. But you can't anymore. The picture ID has ruined everything.

Wealth is walking into any bookshop and buying any book you want without looking at the price tag.

I've had it with being nice, understanding, fair and hopeful. I feel like being negative all day. The chip on my shoulder could sink the QE2. I've got an attitude problem and nobody better get in my way...I'm in a bad mood and the whole stupid little world is gonna pay!

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've always believed in the goodness of people. I teach in prison. They all said, don't do it. Carry a gun, take Mace. Are you kidding? I guess, they're around so many criminal elements that they fear for.

"Family" this and "family" that. If I had a family I'd be furious that moral busybodies are taking the perfectly good word family and using it as a code for censorship the same way "states' rights" was used to disguise racism in the mid-sixties.

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.

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.

I was as equally influenced by Bergman as I was [low-budget sexploitation filmmaker].