John Waters Quotes

Daisy had known the novel was silly even as she had read it, but that had not detracted one bit from her enjoyment.

The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.

The sacred books of all the world are worthless dross and common stones compared with Shakespeare's glittering gold and gleaming gems.

A great novel is worth one thousand films.

all history shows that the hand that cradles the rock has ruled the world, not the hand that rocks the cradle!

We had a world dominated by the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the Americans on the other hand. They called it the Cold War. But it wasn't cold. I am someone who comes from the third world. In the third world, the cold war wasn't cold. Millions had been killed. It was a proxy war.

I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it.

Everybody in the world has to compromise. I don't know one person that gets everything they want, so the politicians are going to have to figure that out and stop pointing out, "He shook hands with a Democrat in 1989. He ate with a Republican last week." It's petty high school, even junior high stuff going on. It's junior high politics going on, so it's a shame.

I do not feel obliged in my reading. I read to be entertained and to relax, and to go into another world, not because it's good for me.

I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.

In a weird way, when everyone's feeling that the world's going to hell in a hand basket, I kind of relax a little more because I often feel like that.

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.

It was easy to leave the art world after I found out that it was just another corporation. When they told me I had to create the same thing, I rebelled.

The hand that controls the supper dish rules the world!

With hat in hand, one gets on in the world.

Illiteracy does not impede the practice of democracy, as witnessed by the success of democracy in India despite the high illiteracy rate. One doesn't need a university diploma to realize that the ruler is oppressive and corrupt. On the other hand, to eradicate illiteracy requires that we elect a fair and efficient political regime.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

It is the thing that is most remote from the world in which we ourselves live that attracts us most. We are under the spell of what is distant from us. It is not our nature to desire passionately what is near at hand.

Food is strength, and food is peace, and food is freedom, and food is a helping hand to people around the world whose good will and friendship we want.

Reason adapts impulses and beliefs into the real world; rationalization, on the other hand, adapts the concept of reality to the impulses and beliefs of the individual. Reasoning discovers the true cause of our acts, rationalization finds good reasons for justifying our acts.

We cannot enjoy peace in this world unless we are ready to yield to the will of God in respect of death. Our times are in His hand, at His sovereign disposal. We must accept that as best.

I have never said a negative thing about anybody, even when the whole world was saying I was gay because Renée Zellweger cited fraud.

I tried carrying the weight of the world. But I only have two hands.