John Waters Quotes - Page 3

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.

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.

I haven't changed - the public has. I'm an insider now, which is hilarious.

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.

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.

I wish something on T.V. would trouble me. Then maybe I would watch it.

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.

I would never do hard-core pornography, because it looks too much like open-heart surgery.

And my little sister Chrissy, for teaching me that life is nothing if you're not obsessed.

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.

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.

"How could you think of such awful things?" liberal critics always ask. "How else could I possibly amuse myself?" I always wonder.

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

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.

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

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'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!

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.

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.

"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.

To me, beauty is looks you can never forget. A face should jolt, not soothe.

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

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!

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.

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.