Quentin Crisp Quotes
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In Manhattan, when you're out of the front door, you're on, and you have to be ready to smile and speak to people.
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If I were God - and I never understand why I'm not - I should say, "Shop around, I don't think you'll find a better bargain than here."
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All this cut-price transcendentalism does not prevent California from being a startlingly physical state. This becomes most obvious where Los Angeles saunters down to the sea. The region is called Venice.
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I had a friend who had two degrees of being made up: when invited I would say 'Can I make up?' and he would say 'Oh yes - tinted?', or he would say, 'Oh yes - clotted?'
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Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.
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It may be true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance, but it's also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts.
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Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.
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Everybody who's been on television more than once wears in public an expression of fatuous affability. Because you may be addressed at any moment by somebody.
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Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically - for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist - but then what isn't?
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Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who...have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies.
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The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It's not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it's the resentment that settles on your face
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The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call “the trouble with you.” Nevertheless, the journey is worth making.
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I read all the books I could find about manners, and the extraordinary thing was, in all books up to the end of the Second World War, most were directed at how to comport yourself in the presence of the ladies.
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Now you can leave home at any time you like.Your mother comes down and finds a picture of the Eiffel Tower on her plate. And she says, 'Oh! Rosemary's gone to Paris. No wonder the bathroom was so tidy.' And nobody minds. But in my day, to go abroad with all those wicked Frenchmen, what would become of them? So no-one ever went anywhere.
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That's the only sense in which I've been lucky: I have the kind of face to which cosmetics could be applied.
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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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When I was young, I wanted to find the Great Dark Man. When I said that I realise now that people thought that by 'dark' I meant black, and that by 'great' I meant big. Whereas I only meant a strong, mysterious person; someone who would 'take me away from all this.'
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While I have very little to say in favor of sex (it's vastly overrated, it's frequently unnecessary, and it's messy), it is greatly to be preferred to the interminable torments of romantic agony through which two people tear one another limb from limb while professing altruistic devotion.
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I now realize that education is a last wild effort on the part of the authorities to prevent an overdose of leisure from driving the world mad. Learning is no longer an improver; it is merely the most expensive time-filler the world has ever known.
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Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.
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It's a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.
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I came first to America in 1977 at the invitation of a man who wanted to make my life story into a musical. But my agent said it was not to be and it was never done. So I went back, but I'd seen New York, and I wanted to live there. Because everybody talks to you in the street. See, nobody talks to you in England.
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Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
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It is true that in America I've become a national hero, but really I was a hopeless case, that was all.