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Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
Quentin Crisp -
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.
Quentin Crisp
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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.
Quentin Crisp -
Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.
Quentin Crisp -
Men get laid, but women get screwed.
Quentin Crisp -
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.
Quentin Crisp -
Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
Quentin Crisp -
Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
Quentin Crisp
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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.
Quentin Crisp -
Britain cherishes her eccentrics and wisely holds that the function of government is to build a walled garden in which anarchy can flourish.
Quentin Crisp -
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.
Quentin Crisp -
I am asked how to remain young, and I say 'Never, never work.' And that, of course, is the secret of it.
Quentin Crisp -
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.
Quentin Crisp -
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.
Quentin Crisp
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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.
Quentin Crisp -
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.
Quentin Crisp -
Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.
Quentin Crisp -
However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
Quentin Crisp -
Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.
Quentin Crisp -
Nowadays people don't use face powder; they say it dries the skin. But I makeup in the old-fashioned way.
Quentin Crisp
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I became one of the stately homos of England.
Quentin Crisp -
I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.
Quentin Crisp -
Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.
Quentin Crisp -
I stay in one room, and it's easier to live there, to control it, to make it warm. It seems to me a convenient way to live, and it's cheap.
Quentin Crisp