New York was the last place that my movies caught on. I didn't make underground movies in New York, and in the 1960s, they were very snobby about that, because the whole scene was here.

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.

In the river swam the gleaming fish, which were meant for water, just as humankind is meant for love.

The tints of autumn...a mighty flower garden blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, frost.

The Futurists?.... Well, of course, they are already past.

The woman's vision is deep reaching, the man's far reaching. With the man the world is his heart, with the woman the heart is her world.

Wealth is only a benefit of the game of money. If you win, the money will be there.

Great spiritual traditions are used as a means to ripen us, to bring us face to face with our life, and to help us to see in a new way by developing a stillness of mind and a strength of heart.

When money rules, we remember the price of things and forget the value of things, and that is dangerous.

I'm not a doom-and-gloom person. But I think there is a difference between transcendence and denial, and much of the Western world is in major denial today.

Once the Government Accountability Office did a review of food safety systems in other countries and found many things about those food safety systems that were better than ours [American].

Having to be different is the same trap as having to be the same.