John Waters
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Kids
I was as equally influenced by Bergman as I was [low-budget sexploitation filmmaker].Collection: Lows
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.Collection: Mean
Shutting down governments on your computer is just as much as fun as going to a riot at Yale.Collection: Fun
The only time I had a normal boyfriend was during the time of AIDS, so maybe that saved me. It's certainly not karma.Collection: Karma
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.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Sex
Aren't maids the ultimate art critics?Collection: Art
Censorship has been my best press agent my whole life.Collection: Agents
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.Collection: Gay
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.Collection: School
If you're not sure you could love your children, please don't have them, because they might grow up and kill us.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Mom
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Real
You see a kid making a film on a cell phone. He doesn't know what he's doing either. But it comes out kind of good.Collection: Kids
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.Collection: New York
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.Collection: Supportive
Everyone wants to be called an outsider so I'm a proud insider. If I was young I'd be in my parents' house shutting down the government on my computer. The new delinquent is the hacker.Collection: Government
I hitchhiked at high school. My parents thought was a perfectly normal thing to do even though God knows I got blown a lot of times riding home from school.Collection: Home
It delights me to find something that kids are doing that surprises me that seems new. That's the best feeling you can have.Collection: Kids
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.Collection: Sexy
I think Chelsea Girls is a complete masterpiece and I think Andy's [Warhol] films are equally as good as the art. I think one day they will be considered equal. They aren't yet. They will be.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Funeral
Contemporary art hates you.Collection: Art
I like rap music. But bragging about being rich to poor people is really offensive. I want to hear a rap song about buying a Cy Twombly painting or dating a museum curator. I want to hear about that kind of rich.Collection: Song
People vomitied at my movies; not because of the movie but because they were drunk. I took credit anyway.Collection: People
I always say you need something weird on your face and some good shoes and nobody looks in the middle.Collection: Shoes
The Easter Bunny is a major reason for heroin addiction in America.Collection: Easter
I liked speed. I was on black beauties all the time. Nothing bad happened to me. I didn't become a drug addict because I always had to make a movie. We weren't stoned when we made them; I was stoned when I made movies up. I did them all.Collection: Drug
I pride myself on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value.Collection: Pride
Do we secretly idolize our imagined opposites, yearning to become the role models for others we know we could never be for ourselves?Collection: Opposites
Technique is nothing more than failed style.Collection: Style
How come there's no terrorism with humor, which is a great way to humiliate your enemy? It's a great time for that.Collection: Enemy
I don't know how I made those movies. I went out every single night, I smoked pot every single day. I drank. We did everything, but I never became a drug addict or an alcoholic. Other friends are dead, many of them. So many people in this retrospective...in Female Trouble, almost everyone is dead.Collection: Night
Sometimes I wish I was a woman, just so I could have an abortion.Collection: Hipster
You have to remember the police used to raid and arrest the audience for seeing Scorpio Rising (1964), or Jack Smith movies. Wouldn't that be exciting today, if you see went to the movie and everyone at the IFC was arrested in a paddy wagon and taken away?Collection: Taken
I've had a pretty amazing life, a good life, and God knows I'm thankful, but I do believe that after 30, stop whining! Everybody's dealt a hand, and it's not fair what you get. But you've got to deal with it.Collection: Good Life
Just make sure your children hate authority and they'll do fine.Collection: Children
The way I photograph... in many ways it's directed by chance and all my mistakes, which are often the best stuff. I found that no matter if it's the same tape, the same TV, and the same camera, I can never duplicate an image... your arm jiggles, there's just too much chance. And I never put it on pause, or use any of that fancy equipment.Collection: Mistake
The first real thing was Divine as Jackie Kennedy [in Eat Your Makeup]. His mother found the bloody Jackie Kennedy outfit in the boot of his car and said, 'What is this?" and Divine said, "I am Jackie Kennedy!" His mother just changed the subject; she didn't know what to say.Collection: Mother
People that pick up hitchhikers I believe are basically good people that believe in other people and understand problems and don't judge people. That's always the kind of person I'm looking for.Collection: Believe
I learned that people like my work because I praise things that others don't like.Collection: People