Top 60 John Waters Quotes

I like the elitism of the art world. I think art for the people is a terrible idea.

I read, every day, the ‘Wall Street Journal”s editorials because I like to think how my smart enemy thinks.

I want to be in a ‘Final Destination’ movie.

I can make a movie for $5M, which used to be a routinely low, independent movie, but there’s no such thing as that any more.

Who have I been starstruck by in real life? One of the weirdest ones was, when we were making ‘Cry-Baby,’ David Nelson from ‘The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet.’ I couldn’t believe he was sitting in my living room. Certainly Patricia Hearst. Tab Hunter. A lot of the stars I’ve worked with, when I first got them.

I believe if you come out of a movie and the first thing you say is, ‘The cinematography was beautiful,’ it’s a bad movie.

Always be prepared if someone asks you what you want for Christmas. Give brand names, the store that sells the merchandise, and, if possible, exact model numbers so they can’t go wrong. Be the type who’s impossible to buy for, so they have to get what you want.

My main residence is Baltimore. I have an apartment in New York, one in San Francisco, and I live in a rental in Provincetown in the summer.

I like art. It’s another way to rebel.

In sixth grade, I went to a very good private school, and I did learn there. I learned how to read and write. If I had quit school in sixth grade, I would know as much as I know today and would have made one more movie. By the time I got to college, I was so bored and angry.

I don’t believe that we should never not talk to people we don’t agree with politically. If you can make that person laugh, it’s the first step to getting him to listen to change their mind.

The nightlife in Baltimore is very mixed. Any gay people I know go to the hipster bars; they don’t go to the gay bars. Start your night at the Club Charles, and then you can meet people to go other places. The Charles has been Baltimore’s favourite cool hipster bar forever.

I like to cook for myself or others, so I cook. I always read at night. Sometimes I go to the movies. I don’t go out wildly during the week.

It’s still possible to make movies. Not so much on YouTube. On YouTube, you wind up with an advertising career. What movie became infamous and a hit because of YouTube? Maybe there is one. I don’t know.

They all want you to make a movie for under a million dollars, which I don’t want to. I don’t want to be a faux radical film-maker at 70. I did that. I don’t need to do it again.

‘Serial Mom’ tested really well when we finally got with the right audience. But they would go to some shopping mall in a deep, deep suburban L.A. neighborhood where they knew people would hate, and they just wanted to spend money to prove that people wouldn’t like it. The movie was not a success when it came out.

Grade school ruined reading for me by demanding book reports for such snore-a-thons as Benjamin Franklin’s biography written for children.

I didn’t follow anybody’s advice, really.

I don’t like reality TV. I don’t want to look down on people.

In the beginning, my equipment, I would rent them from teamster-types, really. I don’t know where they got the cameras – I think from the TV stations. But I don’t know if they asked the TV stations.

Life is a rotten lottery. 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.

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

I always had a work ethic. And I think I very much got that from my father and my mother.

I don’t mind snobs, if they have a reason to be a snob.

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.

For a meal out, my number one restaurant is Peter’s Inn. I first went there when it was an old biker bar. Believe me, when it was Motorcycle Pete’s, that was fun. I had my 30th birthday there.

I’ve been arrested several times. I’ve been known to dress in ludicrous fashions. I’ve also built a career out of negative reviews.

Science fiction is something I never understood.

When I first saw ‘House on Haunted Hill’ as a kid in Baltimore, and the skeleton went out on the wire, and the thousand kids in the audience went crazy… My whole life, I’ve tried to at least equal that cinema anarchy. I came close with the end of ‘Pink Flamingos,’ but I didn’t tie with it.

I wrote about Herschell in my book ‘Shock Value,’ for which I interviewed him. We became friends; I had dinner with Herschell the last year before he died. He was elderly, but his mind was perfectly intact.

If I made a film today, it would certainly be on digital.

New York was scarier than Baltimore ever was. It was terrible in the ’70s. I’m glad they cleaned it up. I got mugged; I had to go to the hospital. Every time you went out, you got robbed. It was horrible. You can’t imagine.

Around ’62 in Baltimore, all the girls had those big hairdos. And then suddenly, a few of the really hip ones started doing their hair straight. And people panicked. And it was called going ‘Joe,’ meaning Joe College. And people would say, ‘I don’t know. Should I be ‘Joe’? I can’t decide.’

I’m thrilled to have a completely new audience that I can get from Court TV, without it being my own trial. That was the only other way I would have gotten it.

I’ve been an art collector since the Sixties, and I kept it very separate from my showbusiness career. I’ve had art shows since the early Nineties, a museum show that travelled to four countries. I’ve had three or four art books; it’s just another way I have to tell stories.

My mother was Catholic, my father not. I went to Catholic high school. Every form of education failed me. I was trouble.

Bergman movies were the most influential. They used to show at Goucher University, which was where my parents used to live. ‘Brink of Life’ was the first one I ever saw. Three pregnant women in a maternity ward and their misery – I love that. That is what I want to show at my funeral.

I’ve taught in prison; I’ve counseled people… I’ve been arrested; I’ve been to the psychiatrist.

My mother’s brother became the undersecretary of the interior for Nixon, which did cause a little drama in my family because I was going to riots and everything, but he turned out great and gave us a nice cheque for an AIDS benefit we had for the ‘Serial Mom’ premiere.

I’d be a bad father. I’m too self-involved.

I don’t like rules of any kind. And I seek people who break rules with happiness – and not bringing pain to themselves.

I’d be arrested if I still smoked because I’m the one who would be changing the battery in the airplane in the lavatory to take out the smoke detector. I would’ve been those people they warn you against.

I also hate those holidays that fall on a Monday where you don’t get mail, those fake holidays like Columbus Day. What did Christopher Columbus do, discover America? If he hadn’t, somebody else would have and we’d still be here. Big deal.

I’m sick of ’60s nostalgia. I’ve been to clubs in New York where it’s just like the Fillmore East. And I thought I hated that then.

I was creating characters early. People didn’t beat me up. I scared them. I hated authority. I could also get people to do things; I was quite the early director. I could make people laugh enough to get their defences down – and then brainwash them.

I wanted to own a junk yard as a child, you know. I used to smash cars and think, ‘Oh, my God, there’s been an accident.’ My mother would take me to junk yards, and I look back on that and I think, ‘Wow, that was really loving.’

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.

There are schools for weird children now. There wasn’t when I was young.

I went through different looks. At one period, I was preppy because that’s how I grew up. But then I had bleached hair in the front. And I used to wear – then I wanted to be a beatnik. It was hard to be a beatnik in suburban Baltimore. But I wanted to be one.

To me, the most important thing is the script. I would never make a movie that I didn’t write. I wouldn’t know how to.

I grew up in Baltimore, which is, you know, a city of extremes certainly, but my parents were very conservative. But they made me feel safe, and even though they were mortified at what I was doing, they encouraged it. I think because they thought, what else could I do?

Isn’t that the most perverse thing you’ve ever heard?

I think it would be fun to die onstage! Just drop dead in the middle of my show? That wouldn’t be so bad.

Putting out compilation records, buying the right to music is incredibly complicated. You have to find the writer of the song and the publisher of the song – not the singer – and make two separate deals.

My dreams have come true. I mean, everything I wanted to happen as a kid has already happened.

Fellini was a little lofty for a teenage boy, but certainly he was a huge influence.

Underground, raw movies that come out of nowhere and change everything – they aren’t slick-looking. But I have nothing against slick-looking as long as the scripts are funny.