When I started my goal was to make a successful underground movie. I started making movies in the mid-60s. Underground cinema then only lasted about two or three years.

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.

We have enough grace for everything.

A new grace for a new life is what we need in the coming year.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...

The ultimate cynicism is to suspend judgment so that you are not judged.

Everything is happening spontaneously, and the witnessing of it is also happening spontaneously. Everything is already happening in natural balance.

Ooh baby, I like it raw!

When you are working hard, you don't have time for anything other than what you are doing in the scene and what the director wants.

In my own case, the most inflammatory statements I have ever made are ones that I have written and remain willing to defend.

How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?