Quentin Crisp Quotes
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The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.
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If you live in America, you don't have to work. You can just drift along in the smiling and nodding racket.
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Many hooligans discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots and, greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope. The fathers superior of the order do not try to influence their children in Satan; they merely shake their heads in sorrow. They know that the apostate must work out his own damnation.
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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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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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No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
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Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
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Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is for a little while. It is alimony that is for ever.
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The proprietor had hair so red that pigmentation had flowed out into every visible inch of his skin and even into the pinks of his eyes, as the colour of flowering cherry trees stains their leaves.
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As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, 'they can’t leave anything alone.'
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The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.
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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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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 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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The programs constantly repeat themselves and one another. No one has yet had the nerve to say, 'As we have nothing sensible to tell you between now and 8:30, please tune in again then.
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I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!
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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.
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God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen. It had become obvious that he was never going to do a thing I said.
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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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If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.
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Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.
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The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.
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I have come to think that both sex and politics are a mistake and that any attempt to establish a connection between the two is the greatest error of all.
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Other-cheekism is not only a way of purifying the soul, it is also part of every weak person's survival kit.