Quentin Crisp Quotes

Britain cherishes her eccentrics and wisely holds that the function of government is to build a walled garden in which anarchy can flourish.

Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.

Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.

The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it

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

Then my hostess said, Oh, Denis (as my name was before I dyed it) never plays the part of a man.

What I wanted most of all was to use sex as a weapon to allure, subjugate, and, if possible, destroy the personality of others.

Mr Melly had to be obscene to be believed

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

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 worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.

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

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

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

When asked, 'Shall I tell my mother I'm gay?', I reply, 'Never tell your mother anything.

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

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

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

To lose is not always failure.

As soon as I stepped out of my mother's womb ... I realized that I had made a mistake,

Los Angeles is just New York lying down.

Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.

I am the last of Britain's stately homos.

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

I don't have any pets. I've got enough dumb friends without them.

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable

I became one of the stately homos of England.

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

Never get involved with someone who wants to change you

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

There is no great Dark Man !!!

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

The court was not previously aware of the prisoner's many accomplishments. In view of these, we see fit to impose the death penalty.

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

For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.

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

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.

I never saw Portsmouth by day.

The very purpose of existence it to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think of us.

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.

As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, they can't leave anything alone.

God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen. It had become obvious that he was never going to do a thing I said.

It is hard enough to share wealth without being involved in undignified scenes; shared poverty consists of nothing else.

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

What better proof of love can there be than money? A ten-shilling note shows incontrovertibly just how mad about you a man is.

Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going.

A clown is a horrible thing to happen to anyone.

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

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.

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

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

My function in life was to render clear what was already blindingly conspicuous.

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

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

If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

Any film is at least better than real life.

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.

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.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper.

The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze.

You're queer, I'll kill you.' I could only ask if the speaker wanted an appointment.

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

People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.

The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, I wish you hadn't made every line funny. It's so depressing.

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

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

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

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!

It is no longer possible to be exotic.

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.

To live in the past is to miss today's opportunities and tomorrow's blessings.

Flowers are words even a baby can understand.

It was not so much that I longed for death as that I didn't long for life.

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

To say a thing is natural is to condone it, never to praise it.

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

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

I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.

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

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

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.

Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

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

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

Exhibitionists have no friends, no friends at all.

Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is for a little while. It is alimony that is for ever.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

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.

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

You will survive if you believe in yourself.

Manners are love in a cool climate.

The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.

Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH.