Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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.
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If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
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I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east.
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To read a novel or see a play was to drink life through a straw - to smoke it through a filter-tip. If we were not afraid of blackening our teeth or riddling our lungs with cancer - if we were a dauntless race of men with strong digestions - we would be able to devour life without the aid of these over-civilized devices.
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The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.
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Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
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In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
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When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?
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Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
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My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
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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.
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If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.
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For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
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Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
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Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
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The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
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The measure of woman’s distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr’s crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.
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I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.
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There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.
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As far as I know, you can fancy someone, you can enjoy their company or you can wish them well. But what being in love is, I don't know.
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To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
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Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): "What's the matter, sexy? Don't you like dehydrated fruit?
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Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.
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I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.