Quotes

Hedwig: My sex change operation got botched; my guardian angel fell asleep on the watch; now all I got is a Barbie doll crotch; I've got an angry inch!

Hedwig: After my divorce from Luther I scraped by with baby-sitting gigs and odd jobs - mostly the jobs we call blow. I had lost my job at the base PX, and I had lost my gag reflex. You do the math.

Hedwig: That song was by a young mister Kurt Cobain - now that kid's got a future!

Hedwig: Ladies and gentlemen, do you like the pelt? Be honest, because some *bitch* stopped me on the way in. "What poor and unfortunate creature had to die for you to wear that?"

[pause]

Hedwig: My Aunt Trudy, I replied. Walked away ladies and gentlemen, walked away!

Yitzhak: Fuck you, I'm going to Guam!

Phyllis: I could have your job! Where's my fucking brooch?

Hedwig: How did some slip of a girly boy from communist East Berlin become the internationally ignored song stylist barely standing before you?

Hedwig: When it comes to huge openings, a lot of people think of me.

Tommy: What is that?

Hedwig: It's what I have to work with.

Hedwig: One day in the late mid-eighties, I was in my early late-twenties. I had just been dismissed from University after delivering a brilliant lecture on the aggressive influence of German philosophy on rock 'n' roll entitled 'You, Kant, Always Get What You Want.' At 26, my academic career was over, I had never kissed a boy, and I was still sleeping with mom. Such were the thoughts flooding my tiny head on the day that I was sunning myself... in an old bomb crater I had discovered near the Wall. I am naked. Face down, on a broken piece of church, inhaling a fragrant westerly breeze.

[sees the golden arches of a McDonald's sign over the wall]

Hedwig: My God I deserve a break today.

Hedwig: Our apartment was so small, that mother made me play in the oven. Late at night I would listen to the voices of the American masters, Tony Tennille, Debby Boone, Anne Murray who was actually a Canadian working in the American idiom. And then there were the crypto-homo rockers: Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie who was actually an idiom working in America and Canada. These artists, they left as deep an impression on me as that oven rack did on my face. To be an American in muskrat love, soft as an easy chair not even the chair, I am I said, have I never been mellow? And the colored girls sing... doo do doo do doo do doo... but never with the melody. How could I do it better than Tony or Lou... HEY BOY, TAKE A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE!

Hansel: Jesus says the darndest things.

Hedwig: [slaps Hansel] Don't you ever mention that name to me again.

Hansel: But he died for our sins.

Hedwig: So did Hitler!

Hansel: Eh?

Tommy: Eve just wanted to know shit.

Tommy: Oh, God, oh, Hedwig, when Eve was still inside Adam, they were in paradise.

Hedwig: That's right, honey.

Tommy: When she was separated from him, that's when paradise was lost. So when she enters him again, paradise will be regained.

Hedwig: However you want it, honey. Just kiss me while we do it.

Hedwig: I have been having the most wonderful time with - do you remember that 45-year-old divorcee with the hair and the mean look? She came up to me after the show and I thought, "This lady wants a piece of me." So I didn't know what to do. I was alone, I had nothing in my hand, I was going to go for the eyes. She came at me from both sides, somehow, and she just gave me a fucking hug. She gave me a fucking hug. Can you figure? Can you fucking beat that? She gave me - also got a few drinks from it, as well.

Hedwig: Stop. You come in here crying, and you want to recreate with me.

[Tommy laughs]

Hedwig: It's a car wash, ladies and gentlemen!