Top 251 Quotes & Sayings by Quentin Crisp - Page 2

Flowers are words even a baby can understand.

You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.

The ... problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a "real" man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who "goes with" other men is not what they would call a real man. The conundrum is incapable of resolution, but that does not make homosexuals give it up.

It may be true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance, but it's also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts.

If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.

If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.

Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.

The more people one has to love, the more one's capacity to love stretches.

People say to me, "When did you come out?" But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I'd found in an attic, saying, "I am a beautiful princess!" What my parents thought of this, I don't know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.

I never spend my time doing anything I'll have to do again tomorrow.

In England, nobody's your friend.

If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.

If I were God - and I never understand why I'm not - I should say, "Shop around, I don't think you'll find a better bargain than here."

To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.

The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call “the trouble with you.” Nevertheless, the journey is worth making.

Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.

Women have decided to be people, which is a great mistake. Women were nicer than people.

To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

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?'

Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.

Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.

Many [hooligans] discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots and, greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope. The fathers superior of the order do not try to influence their children in Satan; they merely shake their heads in sorrow. They know that the apostate must work out his own damnation.

If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.

I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.

Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.

The measure of woman's distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr's crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.

Assoon as I stepped out of my mother's womb on to dry land, I realized that I had made a mistake?but the trouble with children is that they are not returnable.

I've never not been famous.

The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically - for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist - but then what isn't?

It's a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.

Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.

The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.

Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.

Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?

If you don't stay in some days, you can't recharge your batteries.

In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!

It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.

When I was young, we thought that Oscar Wilde was a great nobleman who had thrown his life away for love. Nothing could be less true. He slept with East Enders who were procured for him by Lord Alfred Douglas. He knew them only 'in Braille' - the curtains were never drawn back in the rooms in Oxford where he met those boys. It was the most sordid life you can imagine. And he was bleating about love and dragging the fair name of Mr. Plato into the trial - after a life like that?

I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to a drama school. And I said, "What did they teach you?" And she said, "They taught me to be a candle burning in an empty room." I'm happy to say she was laughing while she said it, but she meant it. I've never learned to be a candle burning in an empty room. So I go on the screen, and I say whatever I'm told to say.

The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.

To lose is not always failure.

Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.

A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.

In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.

The trouble with European cities is that they are drenched in their history, almost all of which is terrible.

I approach my life with logic. I do not act on impulse or emotion. I very seldom find that I say, 'And then I can't think what came over me, but I did this or that or the other.' I nearly always know how I will act and I nearly always act in that way. I don't catch myself out in embarrassing situations because I've acted without forethought. I calculate what I will do.

Vice is its own reward.

You don't have to deal with anyone in America. They accept you the way you are.

I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do?

You can't be a person and a lady. If you're a person, you can open the damned door yourself.

I don't really act. I say the words the way I would say them if I meant them.

People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.

I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): "What's the matter, sexy? Don't you like dehydrated fruit?

Happiness is the only thing I understand.