Top 100 Quentin Crisp Quotes
#1. People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.
Quentin Crisp
#2. The continued propinquity of another human being cramps the style after a time unless that person is somebody you think you love. Then the burden becomes intolerable at once.
Quentin Crisp
#4. The flagrantly gay Quentin Crisp dealt with homophobic bullying by refusing to bow to its onslaught. His number listed in the phone directory, he responded to derogatory remarks accompanied with a stated intent to kill him by asking, "Would you like to make an appointment?"
Quentin Crisp
#5. When asked, 'Shall I tell my mother I'm gay?', I reply, 'Never tell your mother anything.
Quentin Crisp
#6. If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.
Quentin Crisp
#7. As a test of the closeness of your relationship with the world, sex could never be a patch on being murdered. (That's when someone really does risk his life for you.)
Quentin Crisp
#8. It was not so much that I longed for death as that I didn't long for life.
Quentin Crisp
#9. The ... problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a "real" man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who "goes with" other men is not what they would call a real man. The conundrum is incapable of resolution, but that does not make homosexuals give it up.
Quentin Crisp
#11. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#12. I don't think you can really be proud of being gay because it isn't something you've done. You can only be proud of not being ashamed.
Quentin Crisp
#13. My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
Quentin Crisp
#14. Never get involved with someone who wants to change you
Quentin Crisp
#15. 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
#17. For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
Quentin Crisp
#18. However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
Quentin Crisp
#19. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#21. Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality.
Quentin Crisp
#22. Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.
Quentin Crisp
#23. Style is not the man; it is something better. It is a dizzy, dazzling structure that he erects about himself using as building materials selected elements from his own character.
Quentin Crisp
#24. A clown is a horrible thing to happen to anyone.
Quentin Crisp
#25. 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
#26. Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
Quentin Crisp
#27. The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
Quentin Crisp
#28. I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.
Quentin Crisp
#29. Other-cheekism is not only a way of purifying the soul, it is also part of every weak person's survival kit.
Quentin Crisp
#30. Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?
Quentin Crisp
#31. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#32. What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person.
Quentin Crisp
#33. The absolute nothingness of death is a blessing. Something to look forward to.
Quentin Crisp
#34. The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it
Quentin Crisp
#35. Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
Quentin Crisp
#36. Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
Quentin Crisp
#37. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#38. Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH.
Quentin Crisp
#40. 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
#41. What I wanted most of all was to use sex as a weapon to allure, subjugate, and, if possible, destroy the personality of others.
Quentin Crisp
#42. Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): What's the matter, sexy? Don't you like dehydrated fruit?
Quentin Crisp
#43. Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
Quentin Crisp
#44. As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, they can't leave anything alone.
Quentin Crisp
#46. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#47. It is hard enough to share wealth without being involved in undignified scenes; shared poverty consists of nothing else.
Quentin Crisp
#48. What better proof of love can there be than money? A ten-shilling note shows incontrovertibly just how mad about you a man is.
Quentin Crisp
#49. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#50. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#51. Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.
Quentin Crisp
#52. Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
Quentin Crisp
#53. 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
Quentin Crisp
#55. Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
Quentin Crisp
#56. I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.
Quentin Crisp
#57. The gymnasiacs of Venice, in California, are so addicted to these practices that there has arisen a nation of men who can no longer put their arms against their sides
Quentin Crisp
#58. I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to "Hamlet" on the grounds that I knew who won.
Quentin Crisp
#59. Whatever has gone on in the outer world has passed me by. But I think if anyone said to me, 'if you go on like this life will pass you by,' I would reply, 'thank God for that, I nearly got mixed up in the beastly thing.
Quentin Crisp
#60. Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
Quentin Crisp
#61. Sexual intercourse is a poor substitute for masturbation.
Quentin Crisp
#62. 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
#63. You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.
Quentin Crisp
#65. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#67. As soon as I stepped out of my mother's womb ... I realized that I had made a mistake,
Quentin Crisp
#68. If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.
Quentin Crisp
#69. A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.
Quentin Crisp
#70. 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
#71. Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art ... I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.
Quentin Crisp
#72. 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
#73. There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.
Quentin Crisp
#75. In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!
Quentin Crisp
#76. I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east.
Quentin Crisp
#77. Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.
Quentin Crisp
#79. Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
Quentin Crisp
#80. Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.
Quentin Crisp
#81. I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.
Quentin Crisp
#82. Like the voice of a number of homosexuals, this is an insinuating blend of eagerness and caution in which even such words as "hello" and "goodbye" seem not so much uttered as divulged.
Quentin Crisp
#83. 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!
Quentin Crisp
#84. 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?
Quentin Crisp
#85. Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
Quentin Crisp
#86. 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?
Quentin Crisp
#87. Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.
Quentin Crisp
#88. You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
Quentin Crisp
#89. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#90. Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.
Quentin Crisp
#91. The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
Quentin Crisp
#92. You're queer, I'll kill you.' I could only ask if the speaker wanted an appointment.
Quentin Crisp
#93. For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.
Quentin Crisp
#95. The measure of woman's distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr's crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.
Quentin Crisp
#96. Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper.
Quentin Crisp
#97. If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
Quentin Crisp
#98. 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
#99. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#100. The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.
Quentin Crisp
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