I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore. You can look far and wide, but you’ll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It’s as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay.
A psychiatrist once told me early in treatment, “Stop trying to make me like you,” and what a sobering and welcome smack in the face that statement was. Yet somehow, every day of my life is still a campaign for popularity, or better yet, a crowded funeral.
I’d rather have a daughter in a whorehouse than a son in the police force,′ Esther used to rage to anyone who would listen.
I look out through the eyeholes and feel exactly the way Michael Jackson’s son Blanket must have felt.
I’m alive, I think, and so many of my friends are not. I may be nuts to be doing this, but I’m kind of proud of myself. I am having an adventure. I like my life. Even if I have to stand here for the rest of it.
It wasn’t until I started reading and found books they wouldn’t let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.
I liked speed. I was on black beauties all the time. Nothing bad happened to me. I didn’t become a drug addict because I always had to make a movie. We weren’t stoned when we made them; I was stoned when I made movies up. I did them all.
Don’t sleep with people who don’t read.
My idea of an interesting person is someone who is quite proud of their seemingly abnormal life and turns their disadvantage into a career.
True success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.
Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it’s the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.
Without obsession, life is nothing.
Contemporary art hates you.
I’ve had a pretty amazing life, a good life, and God knows I’m thankful, but I do believe that after 30, stop whining! Everybody’s dealt a hand, and it’s not fair what you get. But you’ve got to deal with it.
People vomitied at my movies; not because of the movie but because they were drunk. I took credit anyway.
I like rap music. But bragging about being rich to poor people is really offensive. I want to hear a rap song about buying a Cy Twombly painting or dating a museum curator. I want to hear about that kind of rich.
Do we secretly idolize our imagined opposites, yearning to become the role models for others we know we could never be for ourselves?
I never had any desire to get a tattoo. If I was ever going to get one, I would get a plain anchor with a rope around it, the most unimaginative possible tattoo, like Popeye had.