Quentin Crisp Quotes
-
If you live in America, you don't have to work. You can just drift along in the smiling and nodding racket.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
-
I became one of the stately homos of England.
-
Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.
-
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.
-
The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Men get laid, but women get screwed.
-
Britain cherishes her eccentrics and wisely holds that the function of government is to build a walled garden in which anarchy can flourish.
-
I now know that if you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist.
-
Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
-
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.
-
Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is for a little while. It is alimony that is for ever.
-
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.
-
In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.
-
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.
-
Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
-
Nowadays people don't use face powder; they say it dries the skin. But I makeup in the old-fashioned way.
-
I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.
-
I am asked how to remain young, and I say 'Never, never work.' And that, of course, is the secret of it.