If you can make someone laugh who's dead set against you, that's the first step to winning them over to your side.

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.

The sphere of influence is noticed if your actions reflect the virtues of the kingdom

In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.

I don't have Steve. There is no having the Steve.

Men find happiness neither by means of the body nor through possessions, but through uprightness and wisdom.

I try to live in the moment, every moment.

This is the reason why our Theology is certain: because it seizes us from ourselves and places us outside ourselves.

We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.

When I hear a guy lost a battle to cancer, that really did bother me, that that's a term. It implies that he failed and that somebody else that defeated cancer is heroic and courageous.

Michael (Jackson) was so shy, he'd sit down and sing behind the couch with his back to me while I sat with my hands over my eyes-and the lights off.

If you pay attention to good critics, you have to listen to the bad. So you have to ignore them all really. You can't just cherry pick the glowing ones.