- "My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior -- BEFORE the Reformation." (2000)
- "If you can make someone laugh who's dead set against you, that's the first step to winning them over to your side." (2000)
- Some call me director, producer, filmmaker. I prefer to call myself pube-king.
- Strive for art in reverse.
- To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits 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.
- I pride myself on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value.
- I would love to make a movie for very neurotic children. But then perhaps, I've already done that. I've shown my films at children's birthday parties. They just love them, like Punch and Judy shows.
- Oh, Squeaky Fromme, where were you when we needed you? [1977: when asked about Anita Bryant]
- As far as socially redeeming value, I hope I don't have any. [1983]
- I love Judy Garland, but if a reporter were coming to my home, I wouldn't have her music playing. A gay man loving Judy would be like a black person watching a minstrel show.
- Who on earth would want to assassinate Danny Thomas? It wouldn't even make the front page!
- I'll never be able to do a sequel to Pink Flamingos (1972) because it would have to end with Divine taking a shit and the dog eating it.
- If someone threw up at one of my screenings, it would be like a standing ovation.
- My favorite movie idea is to do a movie where everything's fake -- the trees, the grass, even the sun.
- I would never do hard-core pornography, because it looks too much like open-heart surgery.
- As a child, I always wanted to sit in William Castle's lap, not Santa's!
- I'm 100% gay and about 20% in gay society. Sometimes I'm more comfortable in punk rock clubs than gay clubs. There are just as many rules I rebel from in the gay world as the straight one. I'm gaily incorrect, but I do vote gay.
- Sometimes I wish I was a woman, just so that I could get an abortion.
- A movie star is someone you want to either get drunk with or have sex with.
- 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.
- [on Pink Flamingos (1972)] I don't think it's my best movie, but God knows the day I die it will be in the first paragraph of my obituary. It helped make trash more respectable. It lasted longer than I ever would have imagined. I still meet young kids who have just seen it and they react with the same disbelief that people did the first time. I'm proud of it. It was made to make fun of censorship laws at the time. All that has kind of faded. If I hadn't done the scene where Divine ate dog shit, Johnny Knoxville would have done it in Jackass. The Jackass movies are the closest in spirit to Pink Flamingos than anything else.
- Irony ruined everything. I wish my movies could have played at drive-ins, but they never did, because of irony. Even the best exploitation movies were never meant to be 'so bad they were good'. They were not made for the intelligentsia. They were made to be violent for real, or to be sexy for real. But now everybody has irony. Even horror films now are ironic. Everybody's in on the joke now. Everybody's hip. Nobody takes anything at face value anymore.
- [on The Wizard of Oz (1939)] When they throw the water on the witch, she says, "Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness". That line inspired my life. I sometimes say it to myself before I go to sleep, like a prayer.
- No film can come near The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)'s snuff-like power to horrify. Just saying that great title out loud should give even real serial killers the creeps.
- [on Camille Claudel 1915 (2013)] Not since Freaks (1932) has there been such a harrowing pairing of a star (the sensational Juliette Binoche) with a cast of genuinely handicapped actors. Once again, the great Bruno Dumont proves he is the ultimate master of cinematic misery.[2013]
- [when asked by a reporter why crossdresser Divine ate a piece of dog dirt in his film Pink Flamingos] It was just a little piece of dogshit, and it made her a star.
- I can't go to trials anymore because people recognize me.
- I think everyone wishes they had a mom that would kill for them
- The more money Hollywood pays you, the more they're going to have a say.
- My mother was Serial Mom (1994) in a way: She said it was my best movie - because, I think, she identified with it. Once when I was young there was something on television about a mine disaster and the miners were trapped inside. All of their wives were crying on TV and some of them had their hair in curlers and my mother goes: "Look at her hair". I even put that line in the movie.
- I'd like to kill people for how they dress on airplanes
- [on Serial Mom (1994)] It lasted. It plays on television a lot, especially on Mother's Day.
- I want to meet Eminem, because he has no desire to meet me.
- [Interviewed by Lennyletter]: Well, I'm a feminist. I love women who hate men and hate men who hate women.
- To me, camp was a secret word that gay people used and Susan Sontag exposed it in a great, great way. But then it was done. Once the secret was out, it was over.
- I'm not on Facebook, because I'm not interested in what you had for lunch. But also I work from six in the morning to 10 at night, so I don't have time to look.
- I've always made fun of gay culture. They have more rules than my parents do now.
- It isn't my business who celebrities sleep with, who David Letterman slept with or his marriage, unless he uses a moral stance to put down other people. Then it is very much my business.
- I'm for abortion. If you can't love your kid, don't have it because it'll grow up and kill us.
- I was born six weeks early. Right from the beginning, I was trouble.
- You have to learn the rules of good taste to have fun with bad taste.
- A 20 year old that's angry is sexy, a 64 year old man that's angry is an asshole. If you haven't gotten over some things - you can blame your parents 'til you're 30, but after 40, forget whining about anything. Everybody's dealt a hand, everybody has ups, downs. You can't order up your kids, you can't order up your parents, you just popped here and you're cast, what's ever in you and you have to make the best you can with that character.
- What I don't get is Twitter. Why would you give away your jokes every day? Who's going to buy them? I have the spoken word show, books I've got to do, I've got to save my material.
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