Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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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Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.
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Abatement in the hostility of one's enemies must never be thought to signify they have been won over. It only means that one has ceased to constitute a threat.
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The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
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Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
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Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.
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It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough.
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There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.
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Men get laid, but women get screwed.
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Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.
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Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
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Britain cherishes her eccentrics and wisely holds that the function of government is to build a walled garden in which anarchy can flourish.
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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.
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Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
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I became one of the stately homos of England.
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The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze.
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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.
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The rest of the world in which I lived was still stumbling about in search of a weapon with which to exterminate this monster homosexuality whose shape and size were not yet known or even guessed at. It was thought to be Greek in origin, smaller than socialism but more deadly, especially to children.
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Nowadays people don't use face powder; they say it dries the skin. But I makeup in the old-fashioned way.
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I am asked how to remain young, and I say 'Never, never work.' And that, of course, is the secret of it.
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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.
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Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.
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I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.
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In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.