Anytime you make someone laugh or satirize something, it's the best way to change someone's opinion because they're defenseless - they laugh, they listen.

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.

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.

Without obsession, life is nothing.

[My catholic education] sticked with me. It caused the rage I had to make 'Pink Flamingos.'

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.

Do we secretly idolize our imagined opposites, yearning to become the role models for others we know we could never be for ourselves?

I like hard movies; I like ones that are basically the opposite of a date movie.

The "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" hitchhiker really made people never want to hitchhike again - the hitcher, the show. Hitchhiking is always vaguely sexual.

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Don’t become that which you fear most.

The fickleness of the woman I love is equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

The prayer that is faithless is fruitless.

Some people have the Bible. I have Vogue.

You have to celebrate the gifts because life is so hard and I think once you realize life's gonna be hard, the good stuff really comes forward.

I had now arrived at my seventeenth year, and had attained my full height, a fraction over six feet. I was well endowed with youthful energy, and was of an extremely sanguine temperament.

Congress is a Mafia running a protection racket.. .

One detects creative power by its capacity to conquer one's detachment.

He pushed his glasses up on his nose and gave me a sidelong look, the one that meant he was so sure you were wrong that he could just wait and let you find out for yourself the hard way.