Welcome to our collection of quotes by John Waters. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for John Waters
John Samuel Waters Jr. (born April 22, 1946) is an American filmmaker, actor, writer, and artist. Born and raised in Baltimore, Waters rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films, including Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972), and Female Trouble (1974). He wrote and directed the 1988 film Hairspray which became an international success and was later adapted into a hit Broadway musical. Waters has written and directed other films, including Polyester (1981), Cry-Baby (1990), Serial Mom (1994), Pecker (1998), and Cecil B. Demented (2000). His films contain elements of post-modern comedy and surrealism.
As an actor, Waters has appeared in the television series 'Til Death Do Us Part (2007), and in the films Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Seed of Chucky (2004), Excision (2012), and Suburban Gothic (2014). More recently, he performs in his touring one-man show, This Filthy World. He often worked with actor and drag queen Divine, and the Dreamlanders, Waters' ensemble of regular cast and crew members.
Waters also works as a visual artist and across different mediums, such as installations, photography, and sculpture. In 2016, he received an honorary degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His books Carsick (2015) and Mr. Know-It-All (2020) were both nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. In 2018, Waters was named an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in France.
Cheer up. You never know -- maybe something awful will happen tomorrow.
To me, the most important thing is the script. I would never make a movie that I didn't write. I wouldn't know how to.
I read, every day, the 'Wall Street Journal''s editorials because I like to think how my smart enemy thinks.
I always had a work ethic. And I think I very much got that from my father and my mother.
My dreams have come true. I mean, everything I wanted to happen as a kid has already happened.
I do take a one-week vacation every year, and I go to London in the fall.
There are schools for weird children now. There wasn't when I was young.
My dad saw 'A Dirty Shame.' I felt bad about my father knowing what 'felching' was.
I want to be commercial. I'm never the person who says, 'I don't care if people don't see my movies.' I always want people to see my movies.
I can make a movie for $5M, which used to be a routinely low, independent movie, but there's no such thing as that any more.
I have so many other things going on that if 'A Dirty Shame' is my last movie, that's OK.
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.
Everyone's sex life is funny except your own. Every person's is, and yours never is.
Do I like how digital films look? Sometimes, but sometimes it looks flat, and ugly.
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.
My mother was Catholic, my father not. I went to Catholic high school. Every form of education failed me. I was trouble.
If I'm seeing a three-hour foreign film, I don't want to watch it in a bed.
Everybody think they're an outsider -- that word's over! When I was young, being an outsider, I thought it was a bad thing you didn't want to be.
When I was young, there were bars called the 'Hungry Hole,' and in those same neighbourhoods are now gay people pushing baby carriages.
I don't like rules of any kind. And I seek people who break rules with happiness -- and not bringing pain to themselves.
I'm the smartest at 8 A.M. I wake up at 6, drink three cups of Awake Tazo Tea and read five newspapers. I have to think up something every day, Monday to Friday.
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.
I was in the 'Alvin and the Chipmunk' movie, which was a real bucket list item.
I was as equally influenced by Bergman as I was low-budget sexploitation filmmaker.
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. I guess in the art world I'm not exactly a photographer, but I do use photography.
Stupid is never that entertaining. You can be stupid and sexy, stupid and funny but he's just plain stupid. That is not remarkable, that's what I mean.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People looked at my early pictures and called them the most disgusting things ever, and now 'Hairspray' is being done at every school in Britain and America.
God knows if you could start a new sex act that's more important than making a good movie.
William Castle and Alfred Hitchcock were the first director-personalities. Before then, nobody in America knew what a director was.
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?!
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.
I don't trust anyone that hasn't been to jail at least once in their life. You should have been, or something's the matter with you.
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.
I think that young people understand me perfectly. I think that's the luckiest thing about my career, that I get older and they get younger, and it didn't stop with my generation.
Not wanting anyone to pop my bubble by speaking to me, I immediately began reading Lesbian Nuns, and that did the trick. No one attempted small talk.
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.
I think it would be fun to die onstage! Just drop dead in the middle of my show? That wouldn't be so bad.
Time marches on and I don't care how people watch my movies as long as they see them. I don't care if they're on their phone.
You see a kid making a film on a cell phone. He doesn't know what he's doing either. But it comes out kind of good.
I believe that both Obama and Trump would describe themselves as outsiders.
I don't believe that we should never not talk to people we don't agree with politically. If you can make that person laugh, it's the first step to getting him to listen to change their mind.
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.
'Hairspray' maybe did change people's minds, and that's how you get your political enemies to change their minds -- by making them laugh and making them look at something in a way they haven't seen it. Not by preaching and cutting them off and being a separatist.
My idea of an interesting person is someone who is quite proud of their seemingly abnormal life and turns their disadvantage into a career.
People always ask me what I'm doing on the subway, but I love it! Sometimes I like to ride in the front car and look out the window at the rats.
I've taught in prison; I've counseled people... I've been arrested; I've been to the psychiatrist.
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.
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.
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.
Always, European art cinema has been the most threatening and the grimmest and the most transgressive, I think.
I've always been close to my family. I've got a lot of nieces and nephews, but I'm a good uncle.
Underground, raw movies that come out of nowhere and change everything -- they aren't slick-looking. But I have nothing against slick-looking as long as the scripts are funny.
I like to cook for myself or others, so I cook. I always read at night. Sometimes I go to the movies. I don't go out wildly during the week.
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.
I think I technically learned some things, hopefully. But I go to the movies for characters and story and a berserk vision.
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.
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.
'Blood Feast' is my favorite of Lewis' films. When we shot 'Serial Mom,' and I showed them the infamous tongue scene, one of the female crew members said, 'I hate when a guy does that.'
I like the elitism of the art world. I think art for the people is a terrible idea.
I get dumber as the day goes along. Every second of the day that goes along, I get stupider.
I'm a film director. Gay is an adjective that I certainly am, but I don't know that it's my first one. I think if you're just a gay filmmaker, you get pigeonholed just like if you say I'm a black filmmaker, I'm a Spanish filmmaker, I'm a whatever.
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.
I was always flattered, but I just want my movies to make money. I want to be commercial. I'm never the person who says, I don't care if people don't see my movies. I always want people to see my movies.
Grade school ruined reading for me by demanding book reports for such snore-a-thons as Benjamin Franklin's biography written for children.
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.
Good actors, actually, in real life, are shy and very quiet people a lot of the time.
I never rewatch the great films of my favorite directors because I'm afraid they won't hold up.
I've always believed in the goodness of people. I teach in prison. They all said, don't do it. Carry a gun, take Mace. Are you kidding? I guess, they're around so many criminal elements that they fear for.
I have spoken, and I was understood. It's not like I'm a tragic person who wasn't understood. All those books are in print, all those movies are still out there, the audience gets younger. So I don't have that I've got to do one thing before I die. I did it.
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.
Valentine's Day is my mother's birthday. If I'm wildly in love, I've sent people chicken hearts, which seems to appeal to the kind of person that I've been in love with.
What's fascinating to me is that in rich-kid schools, it's better to be gay. No one is discriminated against because they're gay in a rich-kid school. But in poor-kid schools, it's often not the same. So being gay is a class issue now.
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.
The worst thing you can do is make a cult movie. That means you got three great reviews and nobody went. An art film means it got a lot of good reviews and nobody went. There is no such thing as a counter culture now. What used to be considered that is commercial now.
I like hard movies; I like ones that are basically the opposite of a date movie.
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.