Explore Quotes by John Waters

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.

The few movies I can even think of that I watch over and over would be the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton movie 'Boom!', 'Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!', and 'Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.' I wouldn't call any of them mainstream.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 think I'm probably the only person that, when the parents lent me money to make the movie, they wished I had not paid them back. They could have said 'No,' and it would have ended, and I would have gotten a real job.

'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.

If I'm seeing a three-hour foreign film, I don't want to watch it in a bed.

I do take a one-week vacation every year, and I go to London in the fall.

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'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 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'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.

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 film books at the bottom of the barrel and art books at the top. 'The Ghastly One,' by Jimmy McDonough, is a hilarious biography of one of the most hideous directors who ever picked up a movie camera - Andy Milligan.

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

My perfect day in Baltimore begins with getting my five newspapers. Then I would write.