Waters calls his art conceptual and acknowledges its connection to Richard Prince’s appropriative work. "It’s about writing and editing," he says. "Hardly am I Ansel Adams. Or sitting around with a pottery wheel, like in Ghost. The craft is not the issue here. The idea is. And the presentation." Some pieces are downright goofy, such as the sculpture Rush (2009), a giant, tipped-over bottle of poppers (nitrite inhalants), or prankish, such as Hardy Har (2006), a photograph of flowers that squirts water at anyone who crosses a protective line of tape on the floor. The work incorporating film stills is "low-tech, pretty much — I’m just in a room in the dark like a crazy person," he says, while sculptural works like Rush are fabricated by a crew that includes Michael Houstle and Patty Burgee, who have worked on the production design for all of Waters’s movies.

Waters has an impressive contemporary-art collection that fills all of his homes and clearly makes him happy. (He devotes a chapter in Role Models, a book he just completed that will be published next year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, to his favorites; the chapter is titled "Roommates.") The first thing I notice in his New York apartment, aside from the green walls, is a photographic portrait by Helmut Newton of actress Anita Ekberg. In it she looks like an imposing combination of Waters’s great acting discoveries, Edith Massey and Divine. A large painting of a male profile — "a puke-green, melting silhouette," Waters calls it — by Lester Johnson hangs by the door. "When I went to this fancy little private school called Calvert School in Baltimore — it was a good school, I learned to read and write there, I should’ve quit school then — all the parents had a silhouette of their children done. So this one really spoke to me."

Small architectural sculptures by Vincent Fecteau sit on the living room floor along with a real-looking fake dog. A chiffon toilet-paper roll by George Stoll is installed on one wall. A hazy seascape by his Provincetown landlady, painter Pat de Groot, hangs by the kitchen. ("I live in her house, which is very Grey Gardens," Waters says.) In the bedroom there’s a "Warhol asshole painting," a Stoll sponge sculpture, and a striking painting of a crown by Jess von der Ahe, who paints with her menstrual blood. Over the toilet in the bathroom is a Mike Kelley piece that "really pisses people off," but Waters asks me not to say why, since he writes about it in his book. Also in the bathroom are a funny "Queer Batman" watercolor by Mark Chamberlain and "a Brigid Berlin tit painting; she painted with her tits."

In Baltimore, he says, "I have the Michael Jackson print by Gary Hume looking through a glory hole right in my hall, which is really scary. Plus, you can see it in the mirror, which is even worse." There’s a Cindy Sherman of herself as an unwed mother. There’s the Warhol silver Jackie print that his high school girlfriend bought him for $100 in 1964. There’s a Diane Arbus portrait of his friend Howard Gruber as a drag queen taken in the early ’60s, before Arbus was famous. In the hallway outside the guest rooms is I Peed in My Pants (1994), a life-size photo self-portrait by Tony Tasset that he picked up at Christie’s. "It’s just him peeing in his pants. And it was in the auction from the Enron company — they had it hanging! Which really almost made me like them."

Financing for what Waters was hoping would be his next movie, a children’s film called Fruitcake, has fallen through twice. "I want to do two more movies — that’s enough," he tells me. "I hope I can make two more." He’s now 63 and says he’d be fine focusing on his writing, his art, and his one-man show, which he performs across the country about 25 times a year. As we wrap up our conversation, he shows me a months-old gossip item clipped from the New York Daily News that suggests trash culture remains an inexhaustible source of his inspiration. "Kate Moss does poppers — good for her!" he says. "I’m going to do one in her honor."