Paragraph Quotes

I only read the reviews of my films if they`re amusing. Six books have been written about me but I`ve only met two of the authors. They get my name and birthplace wrong in the first paragraph. From there it`s all downhill.

The camera can photograph thought. It`s better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.

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.

I`ve never understood that aspect of DVDs, where you suddenly put back the things you took out that could go. Why ruin your movie? With material that you`ve taken out? I never get that. I don`t have that impulse... To put them back seems very unpleasant to me. And pointless. It`s like when you`ve written something, when you cut a paragraph, doesn`t it seem dead to you? Doesn`t it look like something you`d never want to include, because the point is, it could go? You`ll never see anything in my pictures, the stuff that came out, stays out.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

Life`s not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

And before I`d got to the end of the first paragraph, I`d come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it`s this: where am I telling it from?

When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you`re doing is not any kind of public show, until you`re ready for it.

When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.

I do small cameos here and there but nothing that requires more than a paragraph of talking, because I`m just an amateur. The movie is a whole different reality.

There are six different things that conflict, ... And some of them are in the same paragraph.

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I`m satisfied with it.

The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out.