Top 180 John Waters Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Keep up with what’s causing chaos in your own field.”

— John Waters

102. “First of all, accept that something is wrong with you. It’s a good start. Something has always been wrong with me, too. We’re in a club of sorts, the lunatic fringe who are proud to band together. There’s a joyous road to ruin out there, and if you let me be your garbage guru, I’ll teach you how to succeed in insanity and take control of your low self-esteem. Personality disorders are a terrible thing to waste.”

— John Waters

103. “I haven’t changed – the public has. I’m an insider now, which is hilarious.”

— John Waters

104. “When I was young, no one wanted to be one; now even the President of the United States would call himself an outsider. So now I’m for insiders.”

— John Waters

105. “Remember: you must participate in the creative world you want to become part of.”

— John Waters

106. “I care about the presidential elections. I always vote. Sometimes I’ve voted more than once, illegally. But you can’t anymore. The picture ID has ruined everything.”

— John Waters

107. “The only way I’ve learned to change anyone’s mind politically is to make them laugh. My whole career has been about that.”

— John Waters

108. “I think that in America there is a new movement of underground movies that wants to kick the ass of independent films that they think whine too much.”

— John Waters

109. “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.”

— John Waters

110. “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.”

— John Waters

111. “Aren’t maids the ultimate art critics?”

— John Waters

112. “I go to colleges all the time in America, and everyone’s gay, and I think how can this be? And it’s only in rich schools. In poor schools, nobody’s gay.”

— John Waters

113. “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.”

— John Waters

114. “When I started making movies about weird people, I knew they were weird, I was infected with irony, and I wanted New York to notice.”

— John Waters

115. “I’d rather have a daughter in a whorehouse than a son in the police force,′ Esther used to rage to anyone who would listen.”

— John Waters

116. “I think social justice is important. I think it’s not fair.”

— John Waters

117. “Wealth is walking into any bookshop and buying any book you want without looking at the price tag.”

— John Waters

118. “There is right and there is wrong, I have NEVER been wrong.”

— John Waters

119. “Even illegal weapons have lost their panache. Zip guns and shanks were at least homemade. Where is the craft in a grade-schooler firing a magnum? What is the world coming to? It’s not even bad to be a communist anymore!”

— John Waters

120. “The further away I am from water, the less well I do!”

— John Waters

121. “I think that nobody gets mad at me anymore, no matter what I say, because I don’t think I’m mean. I am interested in what’s next.”

— John Waters

122. “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.”

— John Waters

123. “I hitchhiked at high school. My parents thought was a perfectly normal thing to do even though God knows I got blown a lot of times riding home from school.”

— John Waters

124. “You should want to be rich at 40, at 20 you should want to kill the rich; it’s the right of youth.”

— John Waters

125. “It reinforced everything that I believe. I am an optimist. I believe in the goodness of people.”

— John Waters

126. “A psychiatrist once told me early in treatment, “Stop trying to make me like you,” and what a sobering and welcome smack in the face that statement was. Yet somehow, every day of my life is still a campaign for popularity, or better yet, a crowded funeral.”

— John Waters

127. “Well cult is a word you would never say in Hollywood. 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!””

— John Waters

128. “Things are going great in every part of my life except movies. That’s okay. I’ve got a lot of other parts of my life. I’ve made 15 movies. You can see any one of my movies and it says the same thing.”

— John Waters

129. “Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends’ insane behavior, or better yet, your own.”

— John Waters

130. “I’ve had a pretty amazing life, a good life, and God knows I’m thankful, but I do believe that after 30, stop whining! Everybody’s dealt a hand, and it’s not fair what you get. But you’ve got to deal with it.”

— John Waters

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

— John Waters

132. “I always want to see films that are startling and amazing. Not just shocking. Shocking is easy to do. But startling in the way that makes you change how you think about things. Those are the movies I like the best.”

— John Waters

133. “I like hard movies; I like ones that are basically the opposite of a date movie.”

— John Waters

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

— John Waters

135. “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.”

— John Waters

136. “Nora Ephron’s great line that “overtipping only costs a few dollars more.”

— John Waters

137. “It delights me to find something that kids are doing that surprises me that seems new. That’s the best feeling you can have.”

— John Waters

138. “New York was the last place that my movies caught on. I didn’t make underground movies in New York, and in the 1960s, they were very snobby about that, because the whole scene was here.”

— John Waters

139. “I have to talk about my movies. I have to give interviews to promote what I’m doing. But no one really knows my personal life. And if you don’t have a personal life I feel bad for you.”

— John Waters

140. “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.”

— John Waters

141. “I want to be harder to reach, not easier.”

— John Waters

142. “Do we secretly idolize our imagined opposites, yearning to become the role models for others we know we could never be for ourselves?”

— John Waters

143. “God knows if you could start a new sex act that’s more important than making a good movie.”

— John Waters

144. “My idea of an interesting person is someone who is quite proud of their seemingly abnormal life and turns their disadvantage into a career.”

— John Waters

145. “At the premiere of Hairspray on Broadway, Harvey Fierstein’s mom said to my mom, “Didn’t we raise great sons?” and my mother just started sobbing, because I’m sure they’d both been through other nights when people didn’t say that.”

— John Waters

146. “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.”

— John Waters

147. “An underground hit didn’t make any money and it cost a dollar to get in.”

— John Waters

148. “I’ll have pot in my home for guests – I’m polite! – but I don’t sit around and smoke by myself, ever. Not like I did when I was young.”

— John Waters

149. “I never rewatch the great films of my favorite directors because I’m afraid they won’t hold up.”

— John Waters

150. “Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents – that is the key to fashion leadership.”

— John Waters