John Waters
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.Collection: Hunting
Going to a sensational murder trial is the only way I can relax.Collection: Relax
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.Collection: Waiting
Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.Collection: Gay
I haven't changed - the public has. I'm an insider now, which is hilarious.Collection: Changed
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.Collection: Mean
I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore. You can look far and wide, but you'll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It's as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay.Collection: Moving
I can't tell the difference between the best and the worst 'cause I realize not everybody wants to have sex in the middle of a demolition derby race in the car.Collection: Sex
I would never do hard-core pornography, because it looks too much like open-heart surgery.Collection: Heart
And my little sister Chrissy, for teaching me that life is nothing if you're not obsessed.Collection: Hipster
Stop blaming your parents. If you're really angry at 60 years old, you're an idiot! You've got to work some of it out.Collection: Years
No comedy should be longer than 90 minutes. There's no such thing as a good long joke.Collection: Long
"How could you think of such awful things?" liberal critics always ask. "How else could I possibly amuse myself?" I always wonder.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: College
I would describe myself as a writer that hopes to take you into my world and help you feel a little safer.Collection: World
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Made
"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.Collection: Perfectly Good
To me, beauty is looks you can never forget. A face should jolt, not soothe.Collection: Looks
People still come to Baltimore and say, "I didn't realize you made documentaries."Collection: People
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!Collection: Goal
I'm perpetual tourist, and that's the best way to travel. Nobody gets used to you, you make new friends without having to hear anyone's everyday problems, and you jet back still feeling like a know-it-all.Collection: Everyday Problems
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.Collection: Laughing
I love radical theorists. But at the same time, I don't agree with them a lot, but I love their theories. I love how they intellectualize rage, and this inner battle that such a tiny percent of people really care about. I find that the most interesting.Collection: People
I've bought the same used car from the same man since I was 16 - a Buick every time. They always work, I don't care what color it is. I don't want people to recognize my car in case I want to commit a crime.Collection: Men
I'm a film director. Gay is an adjective that I certainly am, but I don't know that it's my first one. I think if you're just a gay filmmaker, you get pigeonholed just like if you say I'm a black filmmaker, I'm a Spanish filmmaker, I'm a whatever.Collection: Gay
I really didn't have any bad hitchhiking experiences. The only bad experiences were standing by the road for 10 hours. I never thought I'd get a ride with a ministers wife or a coalminer or a Republican elected official. It was all pleasant surprises. The only drag was the waiting.Collection: Wife
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.Collection: Squares
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.Collection: Years
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.Collection: School
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.Collection: New York
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.Collection: Running
Fifty years seems like a good anniversary. Even after I'm dead, how much better could I get than this? I mean, it's great, I'm not dead, so I get to see it.Collection: Mean
If you're a parent, I tell you how to get through Christmas. I think that if you've ever had a bad feeling about Christmas coming, I'll tell you how to deal with it. So, I think in a way it's like going to a sane psychiatrist that actually gives you some good advice, I hope!Collection: Thinking
I'm an old person because I still buy DVDs. I have every one of my albums and 45s - I even have a couple of 33s and I do have a turntable. But I must admit, I don't listen to vinyl today. But I listen to all types of music.Collection: Couple
I must admit, even my fans everywhere I go in the world - just this week I was in London and Glasgow and the week before I was in Des Moines - my fans all look the same in all those cities - they look great!Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Phones
I think social justice is important. I think it's not fair.Collection: Thinking
Terrible things always seemed to happen to hitchhikers in movies - including my own. It has always been glamorous and dangerous and scary and sexy.Collection: Sexy
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.Collection: Witty
I keep on having ideas and developments. Some happen and some don't, but I still always have a way of telling a story.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: 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!Collection: Gay
The only way I've learned to change anyone's mind politically is to make them laugh. My whole career has been about that.Collection: Careers
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.Collection: Makeup
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.Collection: Thinking
I never thought I'd be 52 years old. I don't think that anybody at 16 thinks like that.Collection: Thinking
The good guys in my movies mind their own business and they don't judge other people. And the bad guys are jealous, they judge other people without knowing the whole story, they want all the attention and they're mean spirited. So I think my films are politically correct in a weird way.Collection: Mean