John Waters Quotes

A writer's occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

I study people all the time. For some reason, we're not very good at seeing what's there or hearing what we're hearing.

I think I'm very curious about other people. I like to sit and eavesdrop, you know.

I often need physical gesture to balance dialogue. If I write in public, every time I need to know what a character is doing with his hand or foot, I can look up and study people and find compelling gestures that I can harvest. Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

It is something I recognise in myself. I do eavesdrop. I do people-watch, a lot.

Kids who want to become writers might want to start carrying a small notebook in their backpack. I encourage people to sit down in malls and listen, just listen, to how people talk.

I love observing both vocally and by sight. So I take on a lot of those elements of people around me.

You watch people and study them the way an alien would.

I come by writing dialogue fairly naturally, I've got a chatty family; I'm a bit of a voyeur, and if I'm ever in a public place, I automatically find myself listening.

When I walk around, I look at people and observe people.

I love to write down things I notice about people or things I've overheard people saying that are interesting. I love people-watching, and I love taking the time to notice the small things.

I always had an interest in seeing people within their environments.

I think an office is just a microcosm of life and the different kinds of people that you will come across and interactions there, and I think if you all sit in a room together, then it gets a bit more intense and fun for people to watch, maybe.

I was really interested in observing people. From a young age, I wouldn't listen to what an adult was saying - I was obsessed with other people's body language.

Watch people and how they handle other people. You have to stay open and keep your eyes open to them.

A lot of my writing and my detailing of scenes are based on my observations of life in Nagpur.

You should read a crowd like you read a magazine.

I'm a people watcher, and I love to listen.

I'm interested in what makes people tick, how they think, what makes them behave the way they do.

Strangers come up to me in bars and tell me about their sex lives. I'm thinking, 'You think I can make it better somehow?'

I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. Most of the time, when people write about one of my books, they're really just writing about what they think I may or may not represent, as sort of this abstract entity. Is that unfair? Not really. If I put myself in this position where I'm going to kind of weave elements of memoir into almost everything, well, I suppose that's going to happen.

The more I think about our species the more I think we just do stuff and make up explanations later when asked. But it's not true that I would rather write than read. I would rather read than write. To be honest I would rather hang upside down in a bucket than write.

I find human behavior really interesting. I think that's ultimately what being an actor is. You explore what it means to be human.

The thing that inspires me most is reading and just observing the people around me. I think those are the two things that make me want to write.