I used to joke that I was trying to sell out, and nobody would buy me.

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.

To alcohol! The cause of... and solution to... all of life's problems

Of course I'm out of my mind. It's dark and scary in there.

When we lose Fenway, we lose the sense that somebody sat here and watched Ted Williams hit.

Far better for a man that he had never been born than that he should degrade a pulpit into a show box to exhibit himself in.

If you have attained something, this is the surest proof that you have gone astray. Therefore, not to have is to have, silence is thunder, ignorance is enlightenment.

Quiet solitude is a nutritional need of the ascending body.

If many people love me, then I must be important.

Faith idles when character shrivels.

And biblically, again, I'm going to go right back to my fundamental Christian beliefs marriage is between one man and one woman.

The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.