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When stripped, I looked less like 'Il David' than a plucked chicken that died of myxomatosis.
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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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Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality.
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You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
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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.
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Manners are love in a cool climate.
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An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
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It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.
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Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.
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The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
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What better proof of love can there be than money? A ten-shilling note shows incontrovertibly just how mad about you a man is.
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It's written into the Constitution that you're allowed to pursue happiness. In England it would be considered a frivolous objective.
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Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
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The low dive had set a standard that only middle-aged hooligans could remember and to which they looked back as Mrs Lot at Sodom.
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Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
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The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
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It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.
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I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.
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Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.
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Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH.
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For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.
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Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
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Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
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All liaisons between homosexuals are conducted as though they were between a chorus girl and a bishop. In some cases both parties think they are bishops.