Top 100 John Waters Quotes
#1. I'm trying to do of a certain attitude in life. I'm against separatism. I'm for everyone to gather. I'm for everyone lunatic to hang out together. I want to hear somebody else's bad night, not just mine.
John Waters
#2. Humor is how you change people's opinions, and if you can make someone laugh, they'll listen, even if they hate you.
John Waters
#3. I always want to see films that are startling and amazing. Not just shocking. Shocking is easy to do. But startling in the way that makes you change how you think about things. Those are the movies I like the best.
John Waters
#4. 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.
John Waters
#5. Life is nothing if you're not obsessed.
John Waters
#6. 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.
John Waters
#7. I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?
John Waters
#8. The Easter Bunny is a major reason for heroin addiction in America.
John Waters
#9. 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.
John Waters
#10. Pot came first when I was young. But I did the work. It wasn't a battle of what came first. They went together like "love and marriage, horse and carriage!"
John Waters
#11. There is right and there is wrong, I have NEVER been wrong.
John Waters
#12. I'm rich! I don't mean money-wise. I mean that I have figured out how to never be around assholes at any time in my personal and professional life. That's rich.
John Waters
#13. 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.
John Waters
#14. Wouldn't you rather your kid be a drug dealer than a drug addict?
John Waters
#15. 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.
John Waters
#16. 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.
John Waters
#17. 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.
John Waters
#18. My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior
BEFORE the Reformation.
John Waters
#19. [W]hat I like best is staying home and reading. Being rich is not about how many homes you own. It's the freedom to pick up any book you want without looking at the price and wondering whether you can afford it.
John Waters
#20. Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents - that is the key to fashion leadership.
John Waters
#21. To me, beauty is looks you can never forget. A face should jolt, not soothe.
John Waters
#22. 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.
John Waters
#23. 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.
John Waters
#24. I like hard movies; I like ones that are basically the opposite of a date movie.
John Waters
#25. I didn't become a drug addict because I always had to make a movie.
John Waters
#26. 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.
John Waters
#27. No comedy should be longer than 90 minutes. There's no such thing as a good long joke.
John Waters
#28. I always wanted to be a juvenile delinquent but my parents wouldn't let me.
John Waters
#29. 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.
John Waters
#31. 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.
John Waters
#32. 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.
John Waters
#33. I'm here today because of LSD. LSD gave me the confidence to be who I am today. Completely.
John Waters
#34. Being a traditionalist, I'm a rabid sucker for Christmas. In July, I'm already worried that there are only 146 shopping days left.
John Waters
#35. God knows if you could start a new sex act that's more important than making a good movie.
John Waters
#36. I built a career on negative reviews. I didn't get a good review ever until Fran Lebowitz gave me a good review in Interview. That was the first good review I got in 10 years.
John Waters
#37. I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.
John Waters
#38. I'm for gay marriage. I don't want to do it, but I certainly think people should be allowed to, and I wouldn't vote for anybody that would be against it. But at the same time, why do we have to be good now? Why can't we be villains in movies?
John Waters
#39. I keep on having ideas and developments. Some happen and some don't, but I still always have a way of telling a story.
John Waters
#40. 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.
John Waters
#41. I never thought I'd be 52 years old. I don't think that anybody at 16 thinks like that.
John Waters
#42. To me, racist jokes are not funny. I am politically correct, in a weird way. I like to push the boundaries that are politically correct.
John Waters
#43. How could you think of such awful things? liberal critics always ask. How else could I possibly amuse myself? I always wonder.
John Waters
#44. 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?
John Waters
#45. 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.
John Waters
#46. 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.
John Waters
#47. It delights me to find something that kids are doing that surprises me that seems new. That's the best feeling you can have.
John Waters
#48. I get dumber as the day goes along. Every second of the day that goes along, I get stupider.
John Waters
#49. I look out through the eyeholes and feel exactly the way Michael Jackson's son Blanket must have felt
John Waters
#50. 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.
John Waters
#51. 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.
John Waters
#52. 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!
John Waters
#53. Yeah, I know I should be fighting for gay rights, but who wants to join the army or get married anyway?
John Waters
#54. I go to colleges all the time in America, and everyone's gay, and I think how can this be? And it's only in rich schools. In poor schools, nobody's gay.
John Waters
#55. My favorite characters are people who think they're normal but they're not. I live in Baltimore, and it's full of people like that. I've also lived in New York, which is full of people who think they're crazy, but they're completely normal.
John Waters
#56. 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!
John Waters
#57. The only way I've learned to change anyone's mind politically is to make them laugh. My whole career has been about that.
John Waters
#58. I came from a generation where women were almost deified, and like Groucho Marx's line, "I wouldn't want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member", I thought, "I wouldn't want to sleep with a woman who would sleep with me!" It took me a long time to work my way through that.
John Waters
#59. 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.
John Waters
#60. 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.
John Waters
#61. It reinforced everything that I believe. I am an optimist. I believe in the goodness of people.
John Waters
#62. I imagine Johnny Mathis hates Bin Laden as much as I do, but could Johnny agree Bin Laden had a better speechwriter than Bush? "Axis of Evil"? Come on. "A swimmer in the ocean does not fear the rain" is much more powerful propaganda. Poetic, even.
John Waters
#63. It was a mystery to me. To that awful black-and-white farm, with that aunt who was dressed badly, with smelly farm animals around when she could live with winged monkeys and magic shoes and gay lions. I didn't get it.
John Waters
#64. I always say you need something weird on your face and some good shoes and nobody looks in the middle.
John Waters
#65. It's always up to other people to say if something is art. I hate it when people say, "I'm an artist." I think, well, I'll be the judge of that. And I don't think "artist" is a job description. It's a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work.
John Waters
#66. 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.
John Waters
#67. Once I climb in, will they believe it's me even if they know who I am, or think I'm just a John Waters impersonator? Which I am in a way every day ... only older.
John Waters
#68. I wish something on T.V. would trouble me. Then maybe I would watch it.
John Waters
#69. 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!
John Waters
#70. I probably would have made [films] anywhere. Every city has something they're ashamed of. I would have made films about it and turned it into something positive.
John Waters
#71. I think it's all independent films. There aren't any! If they were looking for me when I was making Polyester, then it'd be perfect, but they're not. I'm not looking for that. TV is much bigger and better now; far more people see it.
John Waters
#72. 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.
John Waters
#73. If you can make someone laugh who's dead set against you, that's the first step to winning them over to your side.
John Waters
#74. I never rewatch the great films of my favorite directors because I'm afraid they won't hold up.
John Waters
#75. I used to joke that I was trying to sell out, and nobody would buy me.
John Waters
#77. Insider can be more ludicrous. How did I ever end up [as one]? Carsick [Waters's book on hitchhiking] was on the New York Times best-seller list for five weeks. [One of the characters was] a singing asshole that does a duet with Connie Francis! Times have changed. That's mainstream, in a weird way.
John Waters
#78. Coke didn't last long enough; it gave me a hangover for two weeks for being high for ten minutes.
John Waters
#79. I think the extremes are something that's really interesting to see coalesce in movies.
John Waters
#80. I haven't committed all the crimes in my movies, I would have gotten the death penalty many years ago if I had.
John Waters
#81. I learned that people like my work because I praise things that others don't like.
John Waters
#82. Nora Ephron's great line that overtipping only costs a few dollars more.
John Waters
#83. But my abortion politics are simple. If you can't love your child, don't have it, because it will grow up and kill me.
John Waters
#84. 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.
John Waters
#85. Nothing is more impotent than an unread library.
John Waters
#86. I'd love to sell out completely. It's just that nobody has been willing to buy.
John Waters
#87. Hairspray is the only movie I made that's subversive, because they're doing it in every high school in America. A man's playing a woman, and two men sing a love song to each other.
John Waters
#88. You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book.
John Waters
#89. People vomitied at my movies; not because of the movie but because they were drunk. I took credit anyway.
John Waters
#90. Just because something 'happens', because it is 'true', because the 'facts' are correct, does not ensure that it is the truth.
John Waters
#91. I tried heroin. I shot up in high school, but I just thought it was so dreary: puking and nodding.
John Waters
#92. [My catholic education] sticked with me. It caused the rage I had to make 'Pink Flamingos.'
John Waters
#93. 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!
John Waters
#94. 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.
John Waters
#95. I've signed peoples' parole cards at book signings and it's very touching.
John Waters
#96. Why is Mommy crying?" the young boy asks his dad, all sugared up and bewildered with concern. "Because you're an asshole," barks back the father with exasperated logic.
John Waters
#97. 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.
John Waters
#98. I think middle America has changed very, very much. I think people are way more open-minded. I think - I think it's because the Internet. I think they're exposed to so much. All the men talked about how much they love their wife, which I don't hear all the time in art communities.
John Waters
#99. 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.
John Waters
#100. I think [parents] became very proud, even though they were mortified by the early films because no one liked them.
John Waters
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