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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.
Quentin Crisp -
Every day someone notices me and waves to me, or stops and speaks to me, or asks me for an autograph, or photographs me.
Quentin Crisp
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You see, astrology is like fortune-telling. If you can't get it right, you say, "Well, if Venus was doing something peculiar in the background, that would alter your prognostication--because, of course, astrology is rubbish.
Quentin Crisp -
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 βthe trouble with you.β Nevertheless, the journey is worth making.
Quentin Crisp -
If one is not going to take the necessary precautions to avoid having parents, one must undertake to bring them up.
Quentin Crisp -
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
Quentin Crisp -
Vienna is cold, and dark, and sad. It is laid out as though for a royal parade; the streets are wide and they're flanked by monumental buildings, decorated with the faces of angry gods. And on the roof are statues of national heroes, wielding weapons of destruction.
Quentin Crisp -
Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.
Quentin Crisp
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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.
Quentin Crisp -
Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.
Quentin Crisp -
When I was young, I wanted to find the Great Dark Man. When I said that I realise now that people thought that by 'dark' I meant black, and that by 'great' I meant big. Whereas I only meant a strong, mysterious person; someone who would 'take me away from all this.'
Quentin Crisp -
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.
Quentin Crisp -
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."
Quentin Crisp -
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.
Quentin Crisp
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It's a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.
Quentin Crisp -
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.
Quentin Crisp -
Everybody who's been on television more than once wears in public an expression of fatuous affability. Because you may be addressed at any moment by somebody.
Quentin Crisp -
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.
Quentin Crisp -
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.
Quentin Crisp -
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.
Quentin Crisp
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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.
Quentin Crisp -
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.
Quentin Crisp -
I came first to America in 1977 at the invitation of a man who wanted to make my life story into a musical. But my agent said it was not to be and it was never done. So I went back, but I'd seen New York, and I wanted to live there. Because everybody talks to you in the street. See, nobody talks to you in England.
Quentin Crisp -
I now realize that education is a last wild effort on the part of the authorities to prevent an overdose of leisure from driving the world mad. Learning is no longer an improver; it is merely the most expensive time-filler the world has ever known.
Quentin Crisp