Quentin S. Crisp Quotes
-
The imagination is fertile. From seeds of the imagination, much is made manifest.
-
[My muse] is, in fact, a woman of the world, and precisely because of this, hopes that a diversity of cultures will endure, and that one bland monoculture does not swamp everything.
-
On the other hand, the seventies were drab. That is, I am utterly fascinated by the fifties and sixties.
-
I seem to be less depressed but also less hopeful now in my thirties. My widow's peak bothers me. I think a lot about the end of the human race. And so on.
-
Nonetheless, I'm not sure this entirely accounts for my Buddhist voice, which tells me forever to give up writing, to give up on relationships, simply to give up. Whatever it is, it doesn't seem to me to be the voice of innocence.
-
You focus on the here and now in order to escape existence forever and vanish into Nirvana. There is another religious impulse that is the opposite of this. It uses a world elsewhere in order to affirm life and give a reason to "go forth and multiply".
-
I'm more a dog person than a cat person.
-
I grew up with tarot cards and the reading of tea leaves.
-
I really think [William] Burroughs was onto something here, when he said, "Dreams are a biologic necessity and your lifeline into space."
-
I feel that Nagai Kafu was a writer who cold stitch together apparently meaningless moments like these into a lyrical whole, and has enhanced my ability to do the same with my own life.
-
I can't imagine anyone ever again being able to make a film like, say, Summer Holiday, for instance, to give a British example, actually. And there will never be another Annette Funicello. I suppose it's the slight starchiness of the innocence that makes it unrepeatable.
-
To me the seventies represent normality, and, of course, it is a normality that is now anachronistic.
-
I think the seventies caught the last red rays of the dying sun of this innocence, but were already a little cold and drab.
-
Some Buddhists, however, never seem to get past the void, and I suppose I view this as a kind of Buddhist 'Old Testament' that I don't especially like.
-
I do not think that my spiritual apprehensions are as dogmatically cultural as those of many people who have been brought up strictly in a particular tradition.
-
[My muse] feels nostalgic for Japan, and, perhaps strangely, for the pioneer days of America.
-
I'm constantly struggling with the futility and even sinfulness, from an antinatalist point of view, of creativity. And that struggle itself seems part of the creativity, though I sometimes suspect that it's nothing but a burden and an obstacle.
-
In the meditation, of course, the question is repeated and repeated until you run out of answers - or so I hear.
-
I don't know if Britain ever really achieved that much glamour. We had post-war austerity rather than post-war prosperity, and our cultural products of the time include some pretty dour kitchen-sink dramas of the A Kind of Loving variety. (This kind of film seems disillusioned with the sixties before they've even really begun.)
-
The quality of that 'who I am', is what I hope comes out in the writing.
-
I also remember a line from a song by Smog [Bill Callahan], which seems to describe the experience of a town-dweller moving to the country: "I was raised in a pit of snakes/Blink your eyes - I was raised on cake."
-
If there is innocence on Earth again, I tend to imagine it in more [Henry David]Thoreau sort of terms.
-
I've drifted in and out of vegetarianism for years.
-
I suppose I could say that to be interested in innocence already suggests a remove from innocence, perhaps a longing for something that is lost.