John Waters Quotes

“I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore. You can look far and wide, but you'll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It's as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay.”
― John Waters, Shock Value: A Tasteful Book about Bad Taste

“My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior -- BEFORE the Reformation.”
― John Waters

“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.”
― John Waters

“Librarians are always smart, a little nuts, and know how to party.”
― John Waters, Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder

“But before you call PETA, let me explain. I think all dogs should be off leashes, biting people! That's what they want to be doing, running in packs like the wild canines I saw in Bucharest that seem so happy to attack you, snarling and yapping when you get out of a cab. Dogs don't want to be home with their owners stuck in some sort of sick S&M relationship, sentenced to a lifetime of human caresses! How would you like to take a shit with someone following you around, waiting to pick it up with a plastic newspaper bag? Talk about humiliating! Also, I hate to tell you this, but can't you see? Your cat hates you”
― John Waters, Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America

“Later he insisted that "nudity was never a big thing in my movies. When my characters took off their clothes, you wanted them to put them back on.”
― Chris Holmlund, Female Trouble: A Queer Film Classic

“Naturalism was never the point.”
― Chris Holmlund, Female Trouble: A Queer Film Classic

“Only with our modern civilization did we find ourselves forcibly inducted into this individual existence. Of course, we fight to retain this 'inalienable' right, and we are naturally driven to win it and defend it at all costs. We demand this freedom, this autonomy, as a fundamental human right and, at the same time, we are crippled by the responsibility that ends up making us detest ourselves as such.
This is what resounds in the complaint of Job. God asks too much: ''What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him? And that thou shouldest set thy heart upon him? And that thou shouldest visit him every morning, and try him every moment? How long wilt thou not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle? '
This leaves us subject to a contradictory twofold requirement: to seek an identity by all possible means - by hounding the identities of others or by exploring the networks - and to slough off identity in every possible way, as though it were a burden or a disguise.
It is as though liberty and individuality, from having been a 'natural' state in which one may act freely, had become artificial states, a kind of moral imperative, whose implacable decree makes us hostages to our identities and our own wills.
This is a very particular case of Stockholm Syndrome, since we are here both the terrorist and the hostage. Now, the hostage is by definition the unexchangeable, accursed object you cannot be rid of because you don't know what to do with it.
The situation is the same for the subject: as hostage to himself, he doesn't know how to exchange himself or be rid of himself.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“In this sense, in precisely the same way as Canetti conceives vengeance, evil too is automatic.
You cannot will it. That is an illusion and a misconception. The evil you can will, the evil you can do and which, most of the time, merges with violence, suffering and death, has nothing to do with this reversible form of evil. We might even say that those who deliberately practise evil certainly have no insight into it, since their act supposes the intentionality of a subject, whereas this reversibility of evil is the reversibility of a form.
And it is, at bottom, the form itself that is intelligent, insightful: with evil it is not a question of an object to be understood; we are dealing with a form that understands us.
In the 'intelligence of evil' we have to understand that it is evil that is intelligent, that it is it which thinks us - in the sense that it is implied automatically in every one of our acts.
For it is not possible for any act whatever or any kind of talk not to have two sides to it; not to have a reverse side, and hence a dual existence. And this contrary to any finality or objective determination.
This dual form is irreducible, indissociable from all existence. It is therefore pointless to wish to localize it and even more so to wish to denounce it. The denunciation of evil is still of the order of morality, of a moral evaluation.
Now, evil is immoral, not in the way a crime is immoral, but in the way a form is. And the intelligence of evil itself is immoral - it does not aspire to any value judgement, it does not do evil, it speaks it.
The idea of evil as a malign force, a maleficent agency, a deliberate perversion of the order of the world, is a deep-rooted superstition.
It is echoed at the world level in the phantasmic projection of the Axis of Evil, and in the Manichaean struggle against that power.
This is all part of the same imaginary.
Hence the principle of the prevention, the forestalling, the prophylaxis, of evil; rather than morality or metaphysics, what we have today is an infection, a microbial epidemic, the corruption of a world whose predestined end is presumed to lie in good.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else”
― John Waters