Explore Quotes by John Waters

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Good actors, actually, in real life, are shy and very quiet people a lot of the time.

In any film business, if you're trying to get your next film made, you would never say, 'Oh, my last film was a cult film.' I'd say, 'Oh, great, well I hope this one isn't!' I always say to Johnny Knoxville, 'How do you do it? You sort of do the same thing we did, except you made millions, and I made hundreds.'

My early films look terrible! I didn't know what I was doing. I learned when I was doing it. I never went to film school.

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.

I used to hitchhike a lot. I'd come home on the train from New York, and there'd be no cabs, but people would pick me right up and take me to my door because they recognised me. It was like a car service. I never really had a bad experience hitchhiking.

My father was horrified by my movies, yet he lent me the money to make the early ones. And I paid him back with interest.

You have to think of a new way to make something new. And the biggest sin - you can never try too hard. You can never look like you're just trying to shock people, 'cause that's simple. But making people laugh is the hard part.

One Christmas, Dennis Dermody, the movie critic of 'Paper,' gave me 'Rock Hudson: A Gathering of Friends,' the master invitation list from Rock Hudson's memorial service. It's so great. Everyone's in it, with personal addresses all bound into a book. Someone else once gave me Ike Turner's will. I get great stuff.

Liberal censors are the worst. I don't remember any trouble with 'Serial Mom' or 'Cecil B. Demented' or any of them. Except 'Cry Baby.'

On airplanes, strangers confide in me the most deepest, darkest secrets. And I think they think I'll understand. And I generally do understand.

In the 1960s, if you could save $500, you had enough to move to another city and start a new life.

I remember when I first went to the Baltimore Museum of Art and I bought this little Moreau print in the gift shop. I took it home, and I was, like, 12 years old or something.

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.

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.