John Waters Quotes

I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.

Obituaries were among my favorite to write because they have elements no other news stories have - a story from start to finish with a proper conclusion.

I have had lots of friends who've been affected by Aids and a very good friend of mine, Oscar Moore, died of Aids and I was with him in his last year quite a bit. And of course he was a man living in a very rich culture with a wealthy family who was able to afford health care.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

My father always read obituaries to me out loud, not because he was maudlin or morbid, but because they were mini biographies.

Now, I'm the only living member of that group. There was the six of us originally and they're now all gone.

When I first wrote 'Papa Hemingway,' there were too many people still alive, and the lawyers for Random House didn't want to OK it. But now all that's been filtered away by the passage of all these people. And having the fortune of surviving, I now feel that I am the custodian of what Ernest wanted the world to know about him and these women.

There may be a point where I may decide to write an autobiography.

A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

So for twelve miles I rode with Sherman, and we became fast friends. He asked me all manner of questions on the way, and I found that he knew my father well, and remembered his tragic death in Salt Creek Valley.

Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.

One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.

I'd really like to write a book about Timothy McVeigh, but it would only work if he cooperated.

I have known Farley Mowat all of my life, from reading his books as a child to becoming a close friend of his over the last three decades.

Why, I am about doing very well, for I am preparing myself, sir, for a place where hardly any majors, and very few Lieutenant-Generals go. God save us, why should there be such a bustle about the taking off of an old grey head that cannot get up three steps without two men to support it?

It's funny: I don't know if she babysat, but I spent time with Judy Blume when I was little.

I loved 'Just Kids' by Patti Smith.

My father passed away at, like, 87.

Becoming eighty is a matter of life or death. I chose life. It is a much better position to be in, and it's easier on your back.

Brian Jones was a big friend of mine.

Paul Lisicky, in his new memoir, 'The Narrow Door,' describes losing his old friend, the novelist Denise Gess, and his husband, the acclaimed poet and memoirist Mark Doty, within a year of each other: Gess to cancer, at the age of 57, and Doty to another man.

Wake up meat head, don't pretend that you are dead.

Let us drink together, fellows, as we did in days of yore. And still enjoy the golden hours that Fortune has in store; The absent friends remembered be, in all that’s sung or said, And Love immortal consecrate the memory of the dead.