Actors From Baltimore

"I think anybody who gets to that stage in reality is so beyond self-loathing. If you hate yourself, well, then you're going to turn some of that hatred on the world around you."

"Honestly, for me, acting is just a very spiritual thing where I’m just present with the words I read on the screen, and when it’s awful and it kind of makes your skin crawl, then that’s what comes up and that’s what I do."

"I will say that honestly, as an actor ... As a person, I intellectualize plenty before and after, right? But really, as an actor during, I don't need to apply that same intellectual process because, first of all, when you play a character for this long, you just kind of know... It's very intuitive."

"I certainly had the great bounty of drawing on my own experience, becoming a new biological parent, and that was quite natural."

"It doesn't matter who you are as an actor; that's really always in the script. It wouldn't make sense a lot of times to drastically change things. It would threaten to change the story arc and all that kind of stuff. I think really what an actor does is an instrument, not a player."

"I think especially television is a conversation between the writer and the audience, and they're bringing all of their humanity to it. The actors are really just this conduit in the middle, who everybody kind of thinks of like the player, but no, we're really the instrument."

"To me, Joe is this work in progress in dismantling and dissecting the myriad privileges that a young, attractive, white man carries with him. I’m not suggesting that the rest of the world shouldn’t have these so-called privileges. But I think when only one group has them, it’s actually a horrific blindness when it comes to being in touch with humanity. I think it’s material privilege but it’s not emotional or psychological or spiritual privilege, and it seems that that can be a great bondage."

"It's not entirely fair to put that on the viewer because we're purposefully creating a device that is meant to be provocative—and hopefully thought-provoking—but not just titillating."

"There are so many facets to the ways we learn about ourselves, and then therefore treat ourselves and others; the stories that young boys and girls learn about themselves, and the way that that translates into the ways they treat each other. We learn these lessons at home, we learn them on television and in movies and books."

"I’m just thinking of the ways the political discourse would look if women had been present and influential in it since its inception. What kind of time would be taken for any kind of discourse or debate? It might seem like a kind of silly, esoteric idea, but there’s so much about the way that our thoughts are allowed to even form and progress in a social structure that is so intensely male dominant and has been for so long."

""How could you think of such awful things?" liberal critics always ask. "How else could I possibly amuse myself?" I always wonder."

"Life is nothing without a good sense of humor."

"I'll never be able to do a sequel to Pink Flamingos because it would have to end with Divine taking a shit and the dog eating it."

"Parents should worry if their children haven't been arrested by the time they turn sixteen. Being a juvenile delinquent is a birthright and as much a part of healthy adolescence as smoking cigarettes or getting pimples."

"I'd never trust anyone who hadn't spent at least one night of his youth in the local jail. The more hell you raise as a teen-ager, the sweeter your memories will be."

"I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore... It's as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay. No one moves here."

"Animal rights acitivists always say to me, "How could you kill a chicken for a movie?" Well, I eat chicken and I know the chicken didn't land on my plate from a heart attack. We bought the chicken from a farmer who advertised freshly killed chicken. I think we made the chicken's life better. It got to be in a movie, it got fucked, and then right after filming the next take, the cast ate the chicken!"

"All people look better under arrest."

"Going to a sensational murder trial is the only way I can relax."

"Cheer up. You never know — maybe something awful will happen tomorrow."

"If you go home with someone and they don't have books, don't fuck them."

"We watched everything...A family favorite was Cry-Baby starring Johnny Depp. Whenever the John Waters film broke out in song, we would all scream and start singing, too."

"Waters might, once upon a time, have been a candidate to be the American Buñuel, especially when he had the raw hatred of Divine under his command..."

"I stopped taking drugs when I realized that pot smelled bad and LSD trips were becoming like TV reruns. I had had enough inner journeys — I felt I knew myself well enough, thank you."

"Wouldn't you rather your kid be a drug dealer than a drug addict?"

"To me, camp is two older queens talking about Rita Hayworth under a Tiffany's lampshade."

"I've always tried to push things to the limit, but when I started, the censors to be feared were old, conservative, religious men, whereas today the censors are young, rich, liberal men who seem to be against the freedom of expression I fought for. [...] people should be able to have an opinion they don't agree with and still be friends, have a dialogue, or argue about it."

"We're husky, we're hairy, we're homosexual, and out of the second closet."

"And we can cuddle all night!"

"To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits while 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."

"To understand bad taste one must have very good taste."

"I would never want to film hard-core pornography, because it always looks like open-heart surgery to me."

"[I] pride myself on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value."