Hitchhiking, intrinsically, is sexual and dangerous. At the same time I never really felt scared. I was scared that nobody would pick me up and that I’d be waiting by the side of the road for a week.
Technique is nothing more than failed style.
I’m thrilled to have a completely new audience that I can get from Court TV, without it being my own trial. That was the only other way I would have gotten it.
The anger I have about high school – which I do have because they discouraged every interest I ever had; actually I call it anti-education – that anger led to my career.
To understand bad taste one must have very good taste.
To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits while watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation. But one must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste.
Wealth is walking into any bookshop and buying any book you want without looking at the price tag.
Everything makes you who you are, so I was lucky that I had a good family that was horrified by what I wanted to do but was also supportive of it, right to the very end.
I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?
It was a mystery to me. To that awful black-and-white farm, with that aunt who was dressed badly, with smelly farm animals around when she could live with winged monkeys and magic shoes and gay lions. I didn’t get it.
I am on the road all the time. Whether I’m in Paris or in a small college town in Texas, I can’t tell the difference, and that’s good. You don’t have to leave where you were born to be cool anymore.
If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, he should have an outfit for that.
Catholics have more extreme sex lives because they’re taught that pleasure is bad for you. Who thinks it’s normal to kneel down to a naked man who’s nailed to a cross? It’s like a bad leather bar.
No matter what your sexual preference or gender, no one likes a man who is fussy about his looks. You can spend as much time as you want looking good. But don’t do it in public.
And I seek people who break rules with happiness – and not bringing pain to themselves.
When I started making movies about weird people, I knew they were weird, I was infected with irony, and I wanted New York to notice.
I also hate those holidays that fall on a Monday where you don’t get mail, those fake holidays like Columbus Day. What did Christopher Columbus do, discover America? If he hadn’t, somebody else would have and we’d still be here. Big deal.
I love to read about anger. A “feel bad” book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children.
Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.
The further away I am from water, the less well I do!