Quentin Crisp Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Quentin Crisp
Quentin Crisp Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Quentin Crisp on Wise Famous Quotes.
Britain cherishes her eccentrics and wisely holds that the function of government is to build a walled garden in which anarchy can flourish.
The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it
What I wanted most of all was to use sex as a weapon to allure, subjugate, and, if possible, destroy the personality of others.
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.
In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!
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.
Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.
Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): What's the matter, sexy? Don't you like dehydrated fruit?
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.
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 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God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen.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.
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.
In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.
Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
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.
The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze.
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.
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!
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.
Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share
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.
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.