John Waters Quotes

Going back after a long time will make you made, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

I don't know if I change my act from century to century. Sometimes I'm onstage doing imitations and references to people who have been dead for 50 years.

If you're working on a movie, you want it to be projected on the largest tapestry possible, and the sound to be perfect, and for that kind of communal experience of the movies to take place for it.

Sadly, cinemas with film as the primary source are disappearing. We need to remain open to change. That does not require one to divorce the past but to respect and process both the present and the future.

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in. I suppose we all realize the degree to which fear and resentment of what is new is really a lament for the memories of our childhood.

It's fun to sentimentalize the 20th-century lifestyle and the 20th-century brain, but it helps nobody, it makes you look ancient, there's no going back, and you'd be miserable if you did.

I was born into a world in which the most compelling stories are through film. But that wasn't always the case. Everything changes; everything evolves.

Nowadays you never see players playing cards. We used to sit around playing cards together all the time. But I can't fight that, I have to adapt and change.

I feel proud I was part of the old school and still around in the new school.

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.

That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.

When I stop learning something new and start talking about the past versus the future, I will go.

We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age. We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.

Maybe I'm an emblem of an old era, and I have to move on.

Steve was among the greatest of American innovators - brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it...The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve's success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.

It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

With smoking axle hot with speed, with steeds of fire and steam, Wide-waked To-day leaves Yesterday behind him like a dream. Still, from the hurrying train of Life, fly backward far and fast The milestones of the fathers, the landmarks of the past. But human hearts remain unchanged: the sorrow and the sin, The loves and hopes and fears of old, are to our own akin; And if, in tales our fathers told, the songs our mothers sung, Tradition wears a snowy beard, Romance is always young.

I don't believe that one has to tear down the cinema screen in order to renew cinema. But new input and new energy are lacking. They are flowing above all into the television technologies. We must, therefore, concentrate on the CD-ROM.

Some people say well we need a change. Hillary Clinton is been around a long, she sure has, and she's sure been worth every single year she's put into making people's lives better.

It can take a long time to get the rules in place that are conducive to growing, sometimes.

You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

You don't have to be a spiritual seeker, you can be a businessman dealing with the revolution in computers. You could be a congressman, or a scientist. No matter what area of life and endeavor we are in we are seeing the signs of new-paradigm thinking.

In a way the new music showed things could be transformed by new channels of communication.

I believe innovation is the most powerful force for change in the world. People who are pessimistic about the future tend to extrapolate from the present in a straight line. But innovation fundamentally shifts the trajectory of development.

From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.