Always, European art cinema has been the most threatening and the grimmest and the most transgressive, I think.

Oh my God! I hear him yell to just about everybody. Did you see that?! That was John Waters. I'm almost certain he has shit his pants!! I hear grown men laugh in constipated smugness and digestive superiority.

My mother's brother became the undersecretary of the interior for Nixon, which did cause a little drama in my family because I was going to riots and everything, but he turned out great and gave us a nice cheque for an AIDS benefit we had for the 'Serial Mom' premiere.

New York was scarier than Baltimore ever was. It was terrible in the '70s. I'm glad they cleaned it up. I got mugged; I had to go to the hospital. Every time you went out, you got robbed. It was horrible. You can't imagine.

I grew up in Baltimore, which is, you know, a city of extremes certainly, but my parents were very conservative. But they made me feel safe, and even though they were mortified at what I was doing, they encouraged it. I think because they thought, what else could I do?

Marriage equality is a hustler's feeding frenzy of gold-diggers. I campaigned for marriage equality in Maryland because I believe we should have the right to it, but I personally don't want to get married. I don't want to imitate the traditions of heterosexual people. I hate weddings: they make me uneasy.

I like to cook for myself or others, so I cook. I always read at night. Sometimes I go to the movies. I don't go out wildly during the week.

I've been arrested several times. I've been known to dress in ludicrous fashions. I've also built a career out of negative reviews.

Life is a rotten lottery. I've had a pretty amazing life, a good life, and God knows I'm thankful, but I do believe that after 30, stop whining! Everybody's dealt a hand, and it's not fair what you get. But you've got to deal with it.

Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own.

I wish something on T.V. would trouble me. Then maybe I would watch it.

I respect everything I make fun of.

Life is nothing if you're not obsessed.

I always wanted them to look like Hollywood movies; I just didn't know how to do it.

Everybody think they're an outsider - that word's over! When I was young, being an outsider, I thought it was a bad thing you didn't want to be.

I believe that both Obama and Trump would describe themselves as outsiders.

Putting out compilation records, buying the right to music is incredibly complicated. You have to find the writer of the song and the publisher of the song - not the singer - and make two separate deals.

I'm sick of '60s nostalgia. I've been to clubs in New York where it's just like the Fillmore East. And I thought I hated that then.

Underground, raw movies that come out of nowhere and change everything - they aren't slick-looking. But I have nothing against slick-looking as long as the scripts are funny.

To me, the most important thing is the script. I would never make a movie that I didn't write. I wouldn't know how to.

For a meal out, my number one restaurant is Peter's Inn. I first went there when it was an old biker bar. Believe me, when it was Motorcycle Pete's, that was fun. I had my 30th birthday there.

'Serial Mom' tested really well when we finally got with the right audience. But they would go to some shopping mall in a deep, deep suburban L.A. neighborhood where they knew people would hate, and they just wanted to spend money to prove that people wouldn't like it. The movie was not a success when it came out.

I used to hitchhike a lot. I'd come home on the train from New York, and there'd be no cabs, but people would pick me right up and take me to my door because they recognised me. It was like a car service. I never really had a bad experience hitchhiking.

I didn't follow anybody's advice, really.

I've taught in prison; I've counseled people... I've been arrested; I've been to the psychiatrist.

If I made a film today, it would certainly be on digital.

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.

Keep up with what's causing chaos in your own field.

On airplanes, strangers confide in me the most deepest, darkest secrets. And I think they think I'll understand. And I generally do understand.

I was creating characters early. People didn't beat me up. I scared them. I hated authority. I could also get people to do things; I was quite the early director. I could make people laugh enough to get their defences down - and then brainwash them.

Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.

The first record I got, I think I stole. I was with my mother; she turned her back, and I slipped it in my coat. And I think it was 'Cry Baby' by The Bonnie Sisters. That or 'Lucille' by Little Richard.

You should want to be rich at 40, at 20 you should want to kill the rich; it's the right of youth.

I'm alive, I think, and so many of my friends are not. I may be nuts to be doing this, but I'm kind of proud of myself. I am having an adventure. I like my life. Even if I have to stand here for the rest of it.

It's still possible to make movies. Not so much on YouTube. On YouTube, you wind up with an advertising career. What movie became infamous and a hit because of YouTube? Maybe there is one. I don't know.

There is right and there is wrong, I have NEVER been wrong.

Wealth is walking into any bookshop and buying any book you want without looking at the price tag.

Contemporary art hates you.

I like the elitism of the art world. I think art for the people is a terrible idea.

I have so many other things going on that if 'A Dirty Shame' is my last movie, that's OK.

By wrecking something, it's always reinventing. All modern movements in art and music wrecked what came before, in a way - and surprised the cooler generation that was one step ahead. That's how you get ahead.

I never got along in school, really - I already knew what I wanted to do. I have never in my life got a paycheck from anywhere in the world that asked if I went to school.

I don't trust anyone that hasn't been to jail at least once in their life. You should have been, or something's the matter with you.

If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!

The nightlife in Baltimore is very mixed. Any gay people I know go to the hipster bars; they don't go to the gay bars. Start your night at the Club Charles, and then you can meet people to go other places. The Charles has been Baltimore's favourite cool hipster bar forever.

I always was a weird child. My mother told me the story that, in kindergarten, I would come home and tell her about this weird kid in my class who drew only with black crayons and didn't speak to other kids. I talked about it so much that my mother brought it up with the teacher, who said, 'What? That's your son.'

There are schools for weird children now. There wasn't when I was young.

Do I like how digital films look? Sometimes, but sometimes it looks flat, and ugly.

Who have I been starstruck by in real life? One of the weirdest ones was, when we were making 'Cry-Baby,' David Nelson from 'The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet.' I couldn't believe he was sitting in my living room. Certainly Patricia Hearst. Tab Hunter. A lot of the stars I've worked with, when I first got them.