Top 100 John Waters Quotes
#1. My dream is to be able to make something in Baltimore that's just there. Make a movie or make a show there. I only left because there wasn't any opportunity except being an extra in Barry Levinson or John Waters movies.
Derek Waters
#2. John Waters has certainly gotten to a place in his life where he doesn't do anything he doesn't want to do. He's always been that way, but at this point, he's greatly respected for it.
Alicia Witt
#3. I actually did do a musical many years ago with John Waters called Cry-Baby, but technically it was only half me - it wasn't me singing. Tim's [ Burton] the only person brave enough to actually let me try to sing.
Johnny Depp
#4. It was there that, through a mutual friend, I met John Waters - proving what I've always said: you meet the best people on field trips.
Mink Stole
#5. I love John Waters. You see, I want to be the next Divine.
Pia Zadora
#6. I like a strange, wide range of stuff. I like classical music and industrial noise bands. John Waters films and Peanuts cartoons. Barry Manilow and GG Allin. I should have my head examined.
Brian Pinkerton
#7. I love John Waters. There's stuff in it that's beyond the boundaries of my taste, but his movies have always been like that.
Tracey Ullman
#8. John Waters is one of the sweetest, dearest, most adorable men I've ever worked with.
Polly Bergen
#9. Every year I used to write a musical inspired by John Waters, and I would get all my friends together and put on this perverse, emotional, tragic musical.
Antony Hegarty
#10. Oh my God!" I hear him yell to just about everybody. "Did you see that?! That was John Waters. I'm almost certain he has shit his pants!!" I hear grown men laugh in constipated smugness and digestive superiority.
John Waters
#11. 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
#12. I think my favorite movie is 'Joe Versus the Volcano' - or maybe 'Multiple Maniacs' by John Waters.
Justin Kirk
#13. I'd work for John Waters again, because he's so off the wall.
Tab Hunter
#14. I didn't have the sensibilities of your ordinary filmmaker, let alone your ordinary African-American filmmaker. My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodovar, and actors that were part of that world.
Lee Daniels
#15. I'd like to work with John Waters. I grew up in Maryland, so I'm a huge Waters fan.
Judah Friedlander
#16. I met John when I was 18 and I was in my first John Waters film when I was 19.
Mink Stole
#17. Thank you for letting me hijack your wish', I said.
'Thank you for wearing that dress which is like whoa, he said.
John Green
#18. 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.
John Waters
#19. And finally, count your blessings. You got through college. You didn't commit suicide, O.D., or have a nervous breakdown, and let's remember the ones who did. It's time to get busy. It's your turn to cause trouble.
John Waters
#20. 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.
John Waters
#21. But feeling down can make you feel up if you're the creative type. The emotional damage may have already been done to you, but stop whining. Use your insanity to get ahead.
John Waters
#22. I do like Christmas. I do understand that there are people who hate it, and there are other religions that resent it. So, I speak to everybody - I try to speak to every kind of minority and majority that cannot escape the steamroller known as Christmas.
John Waters
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The only insult I've ever received in my adult life was when someone asked me, "Do you have a hobby?" A HOBBY?! DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING DABBLER?!
John Waters
#26. I dislike living in a world without Augustus Waters.
John Green
#27. Abraham Maslow, I present to you Augustus Waters, whose existential curiosity dwarfed that of his well-fed, well-loved, healthy brethren.
John Green
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. I want to leave a mark.
But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars.
John Green
#32. Life is nothing if you're not obsessed.
John Waters
#33. 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
#34. I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?
John Waters
#35. Technique is nothing more than failed style.
John Waters
#36. Like they just wanted to enjoy The Gus Waters Show while it was still in town.
John Green
#37. Everybody should wish they had home movies of themselves, acting out their lunacy on LSD.
John Waters
#38. The Easter Bunny is a major reason for heroin addiction in America.
John Waters
#39. I lit up like a Christmas tree-Augustus Waters
John Green
#40. 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
#41. -so if the inevitability of oblivion worries you, than I suggest you ignore it. God knows that's what the rest of the world does.
John Green
#42. An underground hit didn't make any money and it cost a dollar to get in.
John Waters
#43. I believe that if a seven-year old kid has heard of Naked Lunch and is daring enough to want to read it, he's old enough to read it.
John Waters
#44. 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
#45. I'll have pot in my home for guests - I'm polite! - but I don't sit around and smoke by myself, ever. Not like I did when I was young.
John Waters
#46. 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.
John Waters
#48. You'll find my leg under the coffee table.
John Green
#49. There is right and there is wrong, I have NEVER been wrong.
John Waters
#50. It is occasionally necessary for me to tell Torontonians of the presence of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; they tend to think of the Great Lakes as the waters of the world.
John Irving
#51. 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
#52. Change means traveling in uncharted waters and this causes our securities to rise.
John C. Maxwell
#53. 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
#54. You don't get to chose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers. - Augustus Waters
John Green
#55. My favorite country blues player was Big Bill Broonzy. City blues was Freddie King, but I liked them all - Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Ralph Willis, Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee and the three Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddie. Jazz-wise, I listened to Django, Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery.
Alvin Lee
#56. But, oh, sweet holy Lord, I would ride that one-legged pony all the way around the corral.
John Green
#57. Wealth is walking into any bookshop and buying any book you want without looking at the price tag.
John Waters
#58. He flipped himself onto his side and kissed me. "You're so hot," I said, my hand still on his leg.
"I'm starting to think you have an amputee fetish," he answered, still kissing me. I laughed.
"I have an Augustus Waters fetish," I explained.
John Green
#59. To understand bad taste one must have very good taste.
John Waters
#60. The world," he said, "is not a wish-granting factory.
John Green
#61. Hi, I'm at the Speedway at Eighty-sixth and Ditch, and I need an ambulance. The great love of my life has a malfunctioning G-tube.
John Green
#62. 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.
John Waters
#63. I was thinking about sort of the similarities between "art movies" and lowbrow movies like kitschy sexploitation films. I think they share certain qualities, whether they're hyper-stylized or overly emotive or just very visual.
John Waters
#64. Wouldn't you rather your kid be a drug dealer than a drug addict?
John Waters
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. A good conscience is a port which is landlocked on every side, where no winds can possibly invade. There a man may not only see his own image, but that of his Maker, clearly reflected from the undisturbed waters.
John Dryden
#68. I don't believe in depression. There's no such thing. It's an invention. It's bullshit, it's a cop out.
John Waters
#69. Only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation: I couldn't unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn't want to.
John Green
#70. 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
#71. My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior
BEFORE the Reformation.
John Waters
#72. As rivers, the nearer they come to the ocean whither they tend, the more they increase their waters, and speed their streams; so will grace flow more fully and freely in its near approaches to the ocean of glory.
John Owen
#73. Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.
John Milton
#74. If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, he should have an outfit for that.
John Waters
#75. Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own.
John Waters
#76. If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!
John Waters
#77. 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.
John Waters
#78. There's a prison there, too, which always makes me feel included.
John Waters
#79. 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.
John Waters
#80. Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.
John Green
#81. The main line of the Yugoslav Attack has become just too vast for most players to study in depth, and anyone intending to venture into such tricky waters needs to have an intimate knowledge of all the hidden reefs.
John Nunn
#82. 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.
John Waters
#83. [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
#84. Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents - that is the key to fashion leadership.
John Waters
#85. True success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.
John Waters
#86. To me, beauty is looks you can never forget. A face should jolt, not soothe.
John Waters
#87. Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.
John Waters
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. I like hard movies; I like ones that are basically the opposite of a date movie.
John Waters
#91. I didn't become a drug addict because I always had to make a movie.
John Waters
#92. 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
#93. I think that in America there is a new movement of underground movies that wants to kick the ass of independent films that they think whine too much.
John Waters
#94. 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.
John Waters
#95. Do we secretly idolize our imagined opposites, yearning to become the role models for others we know we could never be for ourselves?
John Waters
#96. No comedy should be longer than 90 minutes. There's no such thing as a good long joke.
John Waters
#97. Aparrently, life is not a wish-granting factory. - Augustus Waters
John Green
#98. How come there's no terrorism with humor, which is a great way to humiliate your enemy? It's a great time for that.
John Waters
#99. I always wanted to be a juvenile delinquent but my parents wouldn't let me.
John Waters
#100. 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.
John Waters
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