John Waters Quotes

During the sixties, all the risk-type sports were very popular, because everybody was rebelling against their parents, or rebelling against the whole system. But those days are over. This is the day of conservatism.

I am continually influenced by the feeling that music culture captured in the late 60s - for my generation, it was a time to rebel, against our parents, against everything.

In my parents' generation, rebellion was pop culture. It's not anymore.

I think my father had a lot of anti-establishment in him. He came through the '60s.

There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard - it's so nice to have a French word for it - is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s.

Not long ago, a hat was a conformist accessory. Then the 1960s came along, and young people didn't want to wear hats.

It was a wonderful time to be young. The 1960s didn't end until about 1976. We all believed in Make Love Not War - we were idealistic innocents, darling, despite the drugs and sex. We were sweet lovely people who wanted to throw out all the staid institutions who placed money and wars above all else. When you're young you think that's how life works. None of us were famous, we were broke. We didn't think they'd be writing books about us in 30 years. We were just kids doing the right thing.

You went to Woodstock and all that trash, your generation is fading fast.

What I was talking about was, of course, very autobiographical - '68 was the moment when all the young people were incredibly excited, because when we were going to sleep, we knew we would wake up not tomorrow, but in the future. There was a sense of future that was the result of the mixture of politics, cinema, music, the first joints. And the movies were a very important part of that cocktail.

And the young people in the 1960's identified with it immediately, because, I guess the young people had been having years of repression really. They felt that the, you know, after the war everything was very austere, particularly in Europe.

The 90's are the 60's standing on their head.

I was a rebellious adolescent. It was the '60s. Everyone was rebellious. I hated high school.

Woodstock didn't define a generation because everyone showed up or those who did were a perfectly representative sample. It defined a generation because, for a few days, it bottled its peculiar zeitgeist.

'Animal House' was sort of the first real, contemporary, youthful voice of the baby boom generation. It spoke to that audience, and it spoke to that part of me which was saying, 'Out with the old, in with the new.'

I think that, in the '60s, you had lots of things going on in the culture which tended to decrease attraction to marriage, attraction to religion, and which tended to increase attraction to crime.

In some ways, the '60s were a reaction to the '50s and the intensity of the Cold War.

When I was young in the 1960s, all the world watched the youth. Everywhere was the sensation of wanting to break the chains but to do something beautiful. It is my privilege to have beauty always near me.

I was very head-strong, and this was the Vietnam War era - You did not listen to your parents or other authority figures. You didn't share their values. No one did in my circle. It was OK to rebel.

If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I'm getting rid of grunge.

When I went to school, it was right after the '60s and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in.... The idealistic wind of the '60s was still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that engrained in them forever.

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.

The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact that the American Way of Life is a fossil of history. What do they care if their old baldheaded and crew-cut elders don't dig their caveman mops? They couldn't care less about the old, stiff-assed honkies who don't like their new dances: Frog, Monkey, Jerk, Swim, Watusi. All they know is that it feels good to swing to way-out body-rhythms instead of dragging across the dance floor like zombies to the dead beat of mind-smothered Mickey Mouse music.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, and Allan Ginsberg's period. Excuse me but that was where it was at. The hippies, I'm afraid, don't know what's happening.

Hippies believe the world could be a better place. Beatniks believe things aren’t going to get better and say the hell with it, stay stoned and have a good time.

The '60s redefined narcissism as idealism.