Quentin Crisp Quotes (66 Quotes)

The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.

It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

Tears were to me what glass beads are to African traders.

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?

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.

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.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.

In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.

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

It is not a biopic it is not a trawl through the facts of somebody's life. It is more an evening with a Shakespearean clown who speaks the truth and was whipped for his pains. Writing the play made me love and loathe my country more love it that it could create, and has always created, one-offs like Quentin loathe it for its rejection of him.

When coming to the end of an interview 'You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality'.

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

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 underta

I told Mr. Hurt it was difficult for actors to play victims, but he has specialized in victims. When he stopped playing me, he played Caligula, which was only me in a sheet. Then he played The Elephant Man, which was only me with a paper bag over my head.

Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.

The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

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 young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

If I were asked to describe the difference between the sexes in the gay world, I would say that the men wanted to be amused the girls sought vindication

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.

If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.

This school was on top of a hill so that God could see everything that went on. It looked like a cross between a prison and a church and it was.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.

Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone- but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

Don't do housework after a few years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

Life is a game in which the rules are constantly changing nothing spoils a game more than those who take it seriously. Adultery Phooey You should never subjugate yourself to another nor seek the subjugation of someone else to yourself. If you follow that Crispian principle you will be able to say ''Phooey,'' too, instead of reaching for your gun when you fancy yourself betrayed.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

A gentleman doesn't pounce he glides. If a woman sits on a piece of furniture which permits your sitting beside her, you are free to regard this as an invitation, though not an unequivocal one.

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.

The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

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.

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it

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.

This woman did not fly to extremes she lived there.