Tag Archives: John Waters

“The lunch he prepared for us was perfect: homemade vegetable soup, tuna-salad sandwiches on chunks of suspiciously healthy-looking bread, and a dessert of berries, followed by coffee. He doesn’t drink, except on Friday nights, when he tends to have fun in biker bars. Mr. Waters’s life is otherwise disciplined. He gets up at 6 a.m. and is usually in bed by 10 p.m. or so: ‘I’m a Swiss person trapped in an American’s body. I like a very orderly life.’ He’s a meticulous man, too. His library of some 8,000 books is carefully catalogued. He’s a bookworm. ‘Nothing is more impotent than an unread library,’ he says. Formerly a heavy smoker, he showed me the record he carries of the number of days since he quit. He was on to Day 2,634.”

—John Heilpern, “Uncharted Waters,” Vanity Fair, June 2010.