Top 251 Quotes & Sayings by Quentin Crisp - Page 3

The gymnasiacs of Venice, in California, are so addicted to these practices that there has arisen a nation of men who can no longer put their arms against their sides

As we all know from witnessing the consuming jealousy of husbands who are never faithful, people do not confine themselves to the emotions to which they are entitled.

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained. If you have no personality, you may be able to save your face and, possibly, your entire anatomy by following the current fashion, but all we shall know about you, when we see you coming down the street, is that you had enough money to buy a glossy magazine and were sufficiently cunning to work out the cut of the garments shown therein.

I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.

I had a friend who had two degrees of being made up: when invited I would say 'Can I make up?' and he would say 'Oh yes - tinted?', or he would say, 'Oh yes - clotted?'

When asked to give advice, I do of course give it, because I give whatever I am asked to give.

Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH.

I am a stereotype. I am an effeminate man.

I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to "Hamlet" on the grounds that I knew who won.

Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.

Other-cheekism is not only a way of purifying the soul, it is also part of every weak person's survival kit.

Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.

I lost the love of all the homosexuals in the world by saying that Princess Diana was trash and got what she deserved. She could have been Queen of England - and she was swanning about Paris with Arabs. What disgraceful behavior. Going about saying she wanted to be the queen of hearts. The vulgarity of it is so overpowering.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

I have to realise that as I am only English and am allowed to live in America, I have to give something in return. And since I cannot build a hospital, or endow a university, I can only give my infinite availability.

If one is not going to take the necessary precautions to avoid having parents, one must undertake to bring them up.

I never saw Portsmouth by day.

Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.

I never say 'No' to anything.

The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It's not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it's the resentment that settles on your face

The absolute nothingness of death is a blessing. Something to look forward to.

If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.

I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!

Europeans have quarrelled since the beginning of time.

I was beaten up wherever I went, and people shouted at me and cursed me and threw things at me.

America believes in freedom. The English don't believe in it. They don't believe in happiness.

What is privacy if not for invading?

I would never go to a place and live there because the weather was good or the scenery was beautiful or the architecture was wonderful. I would only go because the people are kind, and in America, everybody's your friend and happiness rains down from the sky.

I am the last of Britain's stately homos.

Now you can leave home at any time you like.Your mother comes down and finds a picture of the Eiffel Tower on her plate. And she says, 'Oh! Rosemary's gone to Paris. No wonder the bathroom was so tidy.' And nobody minds. But in my day, to go abroad with all those wicked Frenchmen, what would become of them? So no-one ever went anywhere.

Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality.

The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.

You should make no effort to try to join society, stay right where you are. Give your name and serial number and wait for society to come to you.

Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings, they did it by killing all those who opposed them. If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.

The continued propinquity of another human being cramps the style after a time unless that person is somebody you think you love. Then the burden becomes intolerable at once.

I am asked how to remain young, and I say 'Never, never work.' And that, of course, is the secret of it.

Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.

One of the special beauties of America is that it is the only country in the world where you are not advised to learn the language before entering. Before I ever set out for the United States, I asked a friend if I should study American. His answer was unequivocal. "On no account," he said. "The more English you sound, the more likely you are to be believed."

This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there.

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn't even want the beastly thing.

While I have very little to say in favor of sex (it's vastly overrated, it's frequently unnecessary, and it's messy), it is greatly to be preferred to the interminable torments of romantic agony through which two people tear one another limb from limb while professing altruistic devotion.

My outlook was so limited that I assumed that all deviates were openly despised and rejected. Their grief and their fear drew my melancholy nature strongly. At first I only wanted to wallow in their misery, but, as time went by, I longed to reach its very essence. Finally I desired to represent it. By this process I managed to shift homosexuality from being a burden to being a cause. The weight lifted and some of the guilt evaporated.

I've always lived in the same way.

You can behave as badly as you like in America. Nobody notices.

Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.

The proprietor had hair so red that pigmentation had flowed out into every visible inch of his skin and even into the pinks of his eyes, as the colour of flowering cherry trees stains their leaves.

Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.

I learned very early in life that I was always going to need people more than they needed me

As a test of the closeness of your relationship with the world, sex could never be a patch on being murdered. (That's when someone really does risk his life for you.)

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

That's the only sense in which I've been lucky: I have the kind of face to which cosmetics could be applied.

In most cases an act of unwelcome sex is no more bother than being vaccinated, so there's no point going on about it as if it werea fate worse than death. With skill and good manners you can avoid having to make the sacrifice, but should you find yourself in a compromising situation largely of your own making, you should stop defending your virtue and start worrying about your maturity. It will give you something to think about while the savage pumper bangs away.

Fear and hatred do not seem to find expression in tears.

In New York, I find people so courteous and so generous. Free drinks in bars. Free taxi rides.

In fact I try to spend at least one, if not two days without ever leaving my room. Because if I didn't, when would I recharge my batteries?

The message that 'love' will solve all of our problems is repeated incessantly in contemporary culture - like a philosophical tom tom. It would be closer to the truth to say that love is a contagious and virulent disease which leaves a victim in a state of near imbecility, paralysis, profound melancholia, and sometimes culminates in death.

I am told that you regret not what you did but what you didn't do; and so that's why I do everything, so as not to have any regrets.

I read all the books I could find about manners, and the extraordinary thing was, in all books up to the end of the Second World War, most were directed at how to comport yourself in the presence of the ladies.

What matters is not whether you put your fork or knife together because you've finished your meal, or something like that. What matters is that you don't offend people, or hurt their feelings by mistake by saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing.

The world was very feminine when I was young. And now it's very masculine.