Top 349 Quotes & Sayings by John Waters - Page 5

Censorship has been my best press agent my whole life.

I have no interest in ever making a movie I didn't write. If they were going to take my house away, then I guess I might have to. But my agent knows not to even bother sending me the scripts.

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!

I think I technically learned some things, hopefully. But I go to the movies for characters and story and a berserk vision.

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 built my [early] career on negative reviews. There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square. They hated my movies. You could never have that happen today. Critics are way too hip.

Stupid is never that entertaining. You can be stupid and sexy, stupid and funny but he's just plain stupid. That is not remarkable, that's what I mean.

The anger I have about high school - which I do have because they discouraged every interest I ever had; actually I call it anti-education - that anger led to my career.

I was always flattered, but I just want my movies to make money. I want to be commercial. I'm never the person who says, "I don't care if people don't see my movies." I always want people to see my movies.

I used to run away to New York from Baltimore all the time.I would get on the Greyhound bus and tell my parents I was going to some sorority weekend. I'd even make up fake permission slips, come to New York and just ask people on the street if I could stay with them and go see midnight movies.

If you purposefully look to shock people, it isn't funny. That's what 50 million dollar Hollywood comedies do; try to be shocking and dirty. They aren't really. It isn't enough to shock. It's easy to shock. Real surprise is what I'm after. Those early movies, we had drugs, which you weren't supposed to show. You weren't supposed to shoot up. We would make fun of hippies. I think that we were punk before there was punk.

People always ask me what I'm doing on the subway, but I love it! Sometimes I like to ride in the front car and look out the window at the rats.

When I started making movies about weird people, I knew they were weird, I was infected with irony, and I wanted New York to notice.

Everything makes you who you are, so I was lucky that I had a good family that was horrified by what I wanted to do but was also supportive of it, right to the very end.

I never got along in school really - I already knew what I wanted to do. I have never in my life got a paycheck from anywhere in the world that asked if I went to school.

I think that young people understand me perfectly. I think that's the luckiest thing about my career, that I get older and they get younger, and it didn't stop with my generation.

Everyone's sex life is funny except your own. Every person's is, and yours never is. The lengths people go to — and the extremes and the conditions and the mental exercises and guilt and shame and happiness that everybody goes through — and what they'll do for sex is never-ending and mind-boggling and very interesting to me. And I don't think a lot of times people choose any of it.

A lot of kids are moving to Baltimore, because we have a great music scene and we've got edge. Come on down, we've got scary edge. But great edge - it's still a city you can be a bohemian in.

Aren't maids the ultimate art critics?

Ever feel like killing somebody just to see if you could get away with it? Sure, you have. Everybody has little things that get on their nerves.

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.

You go to school to figure out who you want to be and how you can do it, and [maybe] I should have, because the films would probably be technically better.

When I was young, no one wanted to be one; now even the President of the United States would call himself an outsider. So now I'm for insiders.

There is right and there is wrong, I have NEVER been wrong.

I am on the road all the time. Whether I'm in Paris or in a small college town in Texas, I can't tell the difference, and that's good. You don't have to leave where you were born to be cool anymore.

William Castle and Alfred Hitchcock were the first director-personalities. Before then, nobody in America knew what a director was.

Fame is protection if you go to a scary place. Fame is fun. A lot of people don't say anything and you don't know they know who you are.

I just went to Times Square and the underground movies, sometimes three a day. I did get my education. But I really believed then, in 1966, they would not have allowed me to make any of the movies I made. Today, you could make a snuff movie at NYU and get an A.

I think the best article was the article about radical feminists being against transgender women. I found that the most fascinating article and I absolutely loved it. I love battles within the gay community or feminist community. I love radical theorists.

If you're not sure you could love your children, please don't have them, because they might grow up and kill us.

If you think someone's trying too hard, that's the worst thing they can do. To me, it's just desperate, never funny and never witty. It's kind of really old hat because just being shocking isn't enough. It has to change how you think about something. It has to startle you. It has to make you look at something and reconsider whether you're right. That's the whole point.

At the premiere of Hairspray on Broadway, Harvey Fierstein's mom said to my mom, "Didn't we raise great sons?" and my mother just started sobbing, because I'm sure they'd both been through other nights when people didn't say that.

Dreamland Studios then was my bedroom at my parents' house, mostly [starring] people who were in my high school. They look straight at the camera; they're uncomfortable doing it. So, are [early movies] good? No.

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

I couch-surfed for years. But I always wanted to live in Baltimore; I still do. If I had to choose, it would always be Baltimore.

Shutting down governments on your computer is just as much as fun as going to a riot at Yale.

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 keep on having ideas and developments. Some happen and some don't, but I still always have a way of telling a story.

I've signed dicks, asses, parole cards, a colostomy bag while it was still pumping. A couple of years ago, I signed a bloody Tampax. That's one you don't forget. I'm not asking for someone to top that!

It`s great to be able to drive around and spy on people, which I do when I'm writing. People tell me the most personal things about their lives for no reason - on airplanes, everywhere I go. People just blurt out secrets. I'm not sure why. I think that they see in my films that nothing will make me uptight. I'm not going to judge them.

So to make movies, if you're first goal is to make money, well you can! Make a tent-pole movie that China wants. But that's not the kind of thing that's really going to get your remembered. You're not going to change anything with that. You might become rich from it!

Catholics have more extreme sex lives because they're taught that pleasure is bad for you. Who thinks it's normal to kneel down to a naked man who's nailed to a cross? It's like a bad leather bar.

I think that nobody gets mad at me anymore, no matter what I say, because I don't think I'm mean. I am interested in what's next.

Roman Candles was shown in a church, and so was Eat Your Makeup, so was Mondo Trasho, and so was Multiple Maniacs (1970). It's hard to imagine that churches showed these movies but a few in the '60s, like St. Mark's Church, or on the Bowery, they always were left-wing.

I can't complain about anything. It's like saying, "I don't like talkies." Time marches on and I don't care how people watch my movies as long as they see them. I don't care if they're on their phone. Believe me, if you ever want to watch my early films they would look a lot better on your phone than they would on a movie screen. The smaller the better.

I never thought I had more fun when I was young than kids are having today. I think they have just as much fun. It's a different way to have fun.

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!

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because I don't have to do anything except bring wine and go to my sister's all day and go to the movies with the family. So, actually, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, but there's not much comedy material on Thanksgiving. Melatonin really isn't that funny.

I don't think I had a bad influence on anybody. I made people feel better about themselves.

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 haven't committed all the crimes in my movies, I would have gotten the death penalty many years ago if I had.

People are going to say, "I was a lesbian back in the 90s" just like people say, "I was a hippie in the 60s". I see them struggling. Rich girls struggling with their heterosexuality.

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.

I never thought I'd be 52 years old. I don't think that anybody at 16 thinks like that.

I love hipsters! Yes, I think they're hilarious. The really cute ones try to look ugly just to prove "I can't be ugly." Normcore was kind of funny too.

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

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

Baltimore never changes much. People aren't impressed by anything. It's great; it's not a trendy town.

I loved Cookie [Mueller]. She was a much better writer than actress. She shouldn't have stuck with me in the beginning; she should have immediately become a writer. She would have had more of a chance.

I make independent movies. I don't know how to do anything else. I don't know any other job that I could really get.