Top 100 Quentin Crisp Quotes
#1. 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
#2. My only criticism about Quentin Crisp is that the subversive must be ready to subvert themselves. I may dress for myself, but I undress for everybody else, whereas he never did that - he was never prepared to drop a bomb on everything he did.
Sebastian Horsley
#3. Quentin Crisp said it to me; now I say it to you: say yes to everything.
Martin Firrell
#4. Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): What's the matter, sexy? Don't you like dehydrated fruit?
Quentin Crisp
#5. Quentin Crisp said, "To have style is to be yourself but on purpose.
Richard Niles
#6. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#7. People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.
Quentin Crisp
#8. 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
#9. The court was not previously aware of the prisoner's many accomplishments. In view of these, we see fit to impose the death penalty.
Quentin Crisp
#11. When asked, 'Shall I tell my mother I'm gay?', I reply, 'Never tell your mother anything.
Quentin Crisp
#12. If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.
Quentin Crisp
#13. 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
#14. It was not so much that I longed for death as that I didn't long for life.
Quentin Crisp
#15. Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
Quentin Crisp
#16. The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
Quentin Crisp
#17. The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds is just so unlikely I can't go along with it.
Quentin Crisp
#18. 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
#19. The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze.
Quentin Crisp
#21. 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
#22. Fear and hatred do not seem to find expression in tears.
Quentin Crisp
#23. 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
#24. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#25. Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.
Quentin Crisp
#26. Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.
Quentin Crisp
#27. My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
Quentin Crisp
#28. To say a thing is natural is to condone it, never to praise it.
Quentin Crisp
#29. Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.
Quentin Crisp
#30. The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.
Quentin Crisp
#31. Never get involved with someone who wants to change you
Quentin Crisp
#32. 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
#34. To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
Quentin Crisp
#35. For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
Quentin Crisp
#36. However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
Quentin Crisp
#37. 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
#39. The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.
Quentin Crisp
#40. Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality.
Quentin Crisp
#41. Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.
Quentin Crisp
#42. 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
#43. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#44. A clown is a horrible thing to happen to anyone.
Quentin Crisp
#45. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#46. I learned very early in life that I was always going to need people more than they needed me.
Quentin Crisp
#47. This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there.
Quentin Crisp
#48. 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
#50. Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
Quentin Crisp
#51. The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
Quentin Crisp
#52. I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.
Quentin Crisp
#53. Other-cheekism is not only a way of purifying the soul, it is also part of every weak person's survival kit.
Quentin Crisp
#54. Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?
Quentin Crisp
#55. Exhibitionists have no friends, no friends at all.
Quentin Crisp
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is for a little while. It is alimony that is for ever.
Quentin Crisp
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. The absolute nothingness of death is a blessing. Something to look forward to.
Quentin Crisp
#62. The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it
Quentin Crisp
#63. Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
Quentin Crisp
#64. Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
Quentin Crisp
#65. 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
#66. Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH.
Quentin Crisp
#68. Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
Quentin Crisp
#69. Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.
Quentin Crisp
#70. 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
#71. [Sex] is only a mirage, floating in shimmering mockery before the bulging eyes of middle-aged men as they stumble with little whimpers toward the double bed, that somewhere there is a person that will evoke from them sensations of which they dimly dream they are capable.
Quentin Crisp
#72. 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
#73. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#74. Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
Quentin Crisp
#75. As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, they can't leave anything alone.
Quentin Crisp
#77. 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
#78. It is hard enough to share wealth without being involved in undignified scenes; shared poverty consists of nothing else.
Quentin Crisp
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.
Quentin Crisp
#83. Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
Quentin Crisp
#84. It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.
Quentin Crisp
#85. 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.
Quentin Crisp
#86. So black was the way ahead that my progress consisted of long periods of inert despondency punctuated by spasmodic lurches forward towards any small chink of light that I thought I saw ... As the years went by, it did not get lighter but I became accustomed to the dark
Quentin Crisp
#87. The very purpose of existence it to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think of us.
Quentin Crisp
#88. 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
#91. Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
Quentin Crisp
#92. I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.
Quentin Crisp
#93. 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
#94. The more people one has to love, the more one's capacity to love stretches.
Quentin Crisp
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
Quentin Crisp
#98. 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
#99. Sexual intercourse is a poor substitute for masturbation.
Quentin Crisp
#100. Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.
Quentin Crisp
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
