Hairspray is the only movie I made that's subversive, because they're doing it in every high school in America. A man's playing a woman, and two men sing a love song to each other.

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.

I think it's healthy for a person to be nervous. It means you care.

He that distributeth not That which he hath received-- His food, his drink, his sustenance-- Unto devotee, brahman, beggar, wayfarer-- Such a low man as he, they say, is like Unto a lack of rain.

When obstacles have been put in front of me, I just get around them and move past them and laugh at them.

Unless you have a huge ego, I think it requires a tremendous amount of bravery to keep putting yourself out there, knowing that you will get rejected most of the time.

One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one s mistress.

Don't worry about what candidates have done or said, just vote for the Democrats. Then, afterwards, you can go eat fried chicken.

She kind of reminds one of Helen. There's something very similar about Elizabeth Perkins.

A life to hold, or to see slip through uncaring and inattentive hands, but always a life. And given one, we wish for two, or three, or more, so easily forgetting the one we had was spent unwisely

Having traveled a lot and met people from different horizons it makes you more humble and ready to listen.

The soft mellow warble of the bluebird, heard at its best throughout spring and early summer, is one of the sweetest, most confiding and loving sounds in nature.