Quentin Crisp Quotes

Best Quotes by Quentin Crisp (Top 10)

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
Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
Quentin Crisp
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
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
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
Quentin Crisp
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
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
You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
Quentin Crisp
If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
Quentin Crisp
There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.
Quentin Crisp

More Quentin Crisp Quotes

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
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
In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
Quentin Crisp
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
It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.
Quentin Crisp
The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it
Quentin Crisp
However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
Quentin Crisp
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
Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
Quentin Crisp
Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
Quentin Crisp
You should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster
Quentin Crisp
I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.
Quentin Crisp
Euphemisms are not, as many young people think, useless verbiage for that which can and should be said bluntly; they are like secret agents on a delicate mission, they must airily pass by a stinking mess with barely so much as a nod of the head, make their point of constructive criticism and continue on in calm forbearance. Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
Quentin Crisp
The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
Quentin Crisp
Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
Quentin Crisp
The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
Quentin Crisp
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
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
Quentin Crisp
To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
Quentin Crisp
For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
Quentin Crisp
Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
Quentin Crisp
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.
Quentin Crisp
Men get laid, but women get screwed.
Quentin Crisp
Vice is its own reward.
Quentin Crisp
This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there.
Quentin Crisp
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
Quentin Crisp
I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.
Quentin Crisp
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
Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
Quentin Crisp
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
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
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