- "My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior -- BEFORE the Reformation." (2000)
- "If you can make someone laugh who's dead set against you, that's the first step to winning them over to your side." (2000)
- Some call me director, producer, filmmaker. I prefer to call myself pube-king.
- Strive for art in reverse.
- To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits 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.
- I pride myself on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value.
- I would love to make a movie for very neurotic children. But then perhaps, I've already done that. I've shown my films at children's birthday parties. They just love them, like Punch and Judy shows.
- "Oh, Squeaky Fromme, where were you when we needed you?" [1977: when asked about Anita Bryant]
- "As far as socially redeeming value, I hope I don't have any." [1983]
- I love Judy Garland, but if a reporter were coming to my home, I wouldn't have her music playing. A gay man loving Judy would be like a black person watching a minstrel show.
- Who on earth would want to assassinate Danny Thomas? It wouldn't even make the front page!
- I'll never be able to do a sequel to Pink Flamingos (1972) because it would have to end with Divine taking a shit and the dog eating it.
- If someone threw up at one of my screenings, it would be like a standing ovation.
- My favorite movie idea is to do a movie where everything's fake -- the trees, the grass, even the sun.
- I would never do hard-core pornography, because it looks too much like open-heart surgery.
- As a child, I always wanted to sit in William Castle's lap, not Santa's!
- I'm 100% gay and about 20% in gay society. Sometimes I'm more comfortable in punk rock clubs than gay clubs. There are just as many rules I rebel from in the gay world as the straight one. I'm gaily incorrect, but I do vote gay.
- Sometimes I wish I was a woman, just so that I could get an abortion.
- A movie star is someone you want to either get drunk with or have sex with.
- No matter what your sexual preference or gender, no one likes a man who is fussy about his looks. You can spend as much time as you want looking good. But don't do it in public.
- Pink Flamingos - I don't think it's my best movie, but God knows the day I die it will be in the first paragraph of my obituary. It helped make trash more respectable. It lasted longer than I ever would have imagined. I still meet young kids who have just seen it and they react with the same disbelief that people did the first time. I'm proud of it. It was made to make fun of censorship laws at the time. All that has kind of faded. If I hadn't done the scene where Divine ate dog shit, Johnny Knoxville would have done it in Jackass. The Jackass movies are the closest in spirit to Pink Flamingos than anything else.
- Irony ruined everything. I wish my movies could have played at drive-ins, but they never did, because of irony. Even the best exploitation movies were never meant to be 'so bad they were good'. They were not made for the intelligentsia. They were made to be violent for real, or to be sexy for real. But now everybody has irony. Even horror films now are ironic. Everybody's in on the joke now. Everybody's hip. Nobody takes anything at face value anymore.
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