Explore Quotes by John Waters

I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty.

Don’t sleep with people who don’t read.

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.

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.

My idea of rich is that you can buy every book you ever want without looking at the price and you're never around assholes. That's the two things to really fight for in life.

I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?

I like the word 'underground'... 'independent' carries a stigma of whininess. 'Underground' means a good time.

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.

Everyone's sex life is funny except your own. Every person's is, and yours never is. The lengths people go to — and the extremes and the conditions and the mental exercises and guilt and shame and happiness that everybody goes through — and what they'll do for sex is never-ending and mind-boggling and very interesting to me. And I don't think a lot of times people choose any of it.

No matter what your sexual preference or gender, no one likes a man who is fussy about his looks. You can spend as much time as you want looking good. But don`t do it in public.

Catholics have more extreme sex lives because they're taught that pleasure is bad for you. Who thinks it's normal to kneel down to a naked man who's nailed to a cross? It's like a bad leather bar.

"Family" this and "family" that. If I had a family I'd be furious that moral busybodies are taking the perfectly good word family and using it as a code for censorship the same way "states' rights" was used to disguise racism in the mid-sixties.

If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that.

"How could you think of such awful things?" liberal critics always ask. "How else could I possibly amuse myself?" I always wonder.

To understand bad taste one must have very good taste.

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.

To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits while watching one of my films, it's like getting a standing ovation. But one must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste.

I pride myself on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value.

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

I used to joke that I was trying to sell out, and nobody would buy me.