Top 251 Quotes & Sayings by Quentin Crisp
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English writer Quentin Crisp.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.
Abatement in the hostility of one's enemies must never be thought to signify they have been won over. It only means that one has ceased to constitute a threat.
The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.
The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.
The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.
The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.
There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
Men get laid, but women get screwed.
Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.
Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.
Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.
For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough.
Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.
You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.
I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.
The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.
The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?
Manners are love in a cool climate.
No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
Never get involved with someone who wants to change you
You will survive if you believe in yourself.
To live in the past is to miss today's opportunities and tomorrow's blessings.
When asked, 'Shall I tell my mother I'm gay?', I reply, 'Never tell your mother anything.
The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it
Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.
Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.
Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.
Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.
The flagrantly gay Quentin Crisp dealt with homophobic bullying by refusing to bow to its onslaught. His number listed in the phone directory, he responded to derogatory remarks accompanied with a stated intent to kill him by asking, "Would you like to make an appointment?"
Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can't help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. And they don't like that. That's the famous joke: I don't like peas, and I'm glad I don't like them, because if I liked them I would eat them and I hate them.
If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.
What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person.
When I was young, I and the whole world thought that all homosexuals were effeminate. And of course they're not. You can just see which people are effeminate; that's the only difference. So, I became a prototype of the effeminate man, because I was conspicuously effeminate. But camp is not something I do, it's something I am.
I don't think you can really be proud of being gay because it isn't something you've done. You can only be proud of not being ashamed.
Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who...have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies.
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