John Waters Quotes

In preschool, I would plan out my show-and-tell every week to be funny and exciting. Then in first grade I wrote a play, and my classmates and I performed it as a puppet show.

Many of my short stories (all unpublished) were horror, and the novel I'd just finished was horror, too.

I wanted to write a horror story. But in some ways, I have always thought of myself as a kind of ghost-story/horror writer, though most of the time the supernatural never actually appears on stage.

I really like doing puppetry; I'm not sure if it will find its way into 'Big Bang,' but it always does seem to find its way into a lot of things.

I have always used emotion as a writing tool. That goes back to me being on the stage.

I feel lucky that I get to read and publish stories that are not necessarily overtly horror in 'Best Horror of the Year.'

The journalism school helped me develop writing skills, and I had been enjoying cartooning from a very young age. My interest in puppetry, however, came much later.

I was very much in my room with my marionette stage, you know, creating these incredibly boring things that I felt were so fascinating, and forcing my relatives to come, and charging money for them to see my little productions.

Before I even knew what that half of my family did, I was interested in performing. I remember being seven years old and up on a stage and loving it. I've always adored it. Not just acting, but the whole process of writing and directing movies, everything that has to do with that part of life. Maybe it's in my blood.

It seems like I've been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade - both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!

I remember clearly watching a 'Sooty Show' at a theatre and telling my mum I wanted to be up with the puppets, not in the audience.

I've never had anyone put on a puppet show to convince me of anything. And I've done a lot of stuff. I don't know that I would put the puppets on when I was pitching a show. This was the head of the studio putting a puppet show on. And I'll tell you, he wasn't bad.

Down the road a bit, I would like to write a couple of stand-alone adult novels, especially in the horror genre. I've got lots of things up my sleeve.

Since I was a small child, I was always writing either poems or plays... plays in which I had the starring part.

Writing was something I always as a kid thought would be fabulous and glamorous to be a writer.

When theatre works, it's like nothing else, and when it doesn't, which is often, it's excruciating. It's perhaps not so excruciating when a novel goes wrong, but there is a kind of magic that can and should happen.

Stepping back into theatre, a childhood dream, I always felt like I would be onstage. I hadn't imagined myself in a composer role... I find it so satisfying to be behind the scenes and writing the music and watching it elevated and characterized by different voices than my own. It's so exciting.

I really started considering myself a writer when I was about seven or eight years old. I wrote stories from my dreams and kept them all in a notebook that I still have.

I was just a kid selling monster stories to the kids in the projects, complete with a dramatic reading, making the werewolf sounds. My career was aborted early on because one of my main customers started to have nightmares and his mother came to my mother and my mother shut down my whole business.

I wanted to write a balls-to-the-wall supernatural horror story, something I haven't done in a long time.

If as a child I had written a story, the best story that I could imagine, I would have written as indeed is happening to me.

I had been writing since I was pretty small, and I've always been telling these stories about doors and finding other worlds within our own.

Sometimes when I'm performing, whenever my puppet cracks a joke, it actually makes me laugh.

I liked horror and comedy, basically, from a young age, but I just ended up getting into comedy because there was - I could do stand-up comedy, and that was my way into this business, and then there was no stand-up horror, and I didn't know how to get into that world.

I'm writing all the books I wish I had when I was a kid.