Quentin Crisp Quotes

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.

If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

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

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained. If you have no personality, you may be able to save your face and, possibly, your entire anatomy by following the current fashion, but all we shall know about you, when we see you coming down the street, is that you had enough money to buy a glossy magazine and were sufficiently cunning to work out the cut of the garments shown therein.

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.

In most cases an act of unwelcome sex is no more bother than being vaccinated, so there's no point going on about it as if it werea fate worse than death. With skill and good manners you can avoid having to make the sacrifice, but should you find yourself in a compromising situation largely of your own making, you should stop defending your virtue and start worrying about your maturity. It will give you something to think about while the savage pumper bangs away.

The rest of the world in which I lived was still stumbling about in search of a weapon with which to exterminate this monster [homosexuality] whose shape and size were not yet known or even guessed at. It was thought to be Greek in origin, smaller than socialism but more deadly, especially to children.

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.

Los Angeles is just New York lying down.

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.

Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.

I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.

Fear and hatred do not seem to find expression in tears.

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

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

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?"

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.)

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.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.

I don't have any pets. I've got enough dumb friends without them.

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

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

Among other objections to the image of me was that I hated animals. I still do. I have enough dumb friends without them.

Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.

I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

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

Other-cheekism is not only a way of purifying the soul, it is also part of every weak person's survival kit.

You first have to find who you are. Then, you have to be it like mad.

Never get involved with someone who wants to change you

Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.

As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, they can't leave anything alone.

Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.

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.

Then my hostess said, Oh, Denis (as my name was before I dyed it) never plays the part of a man.

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.

Any film is at least better than real life.

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.

The more people one has to love, the more one's capacity to love stretches.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.

To say a thing is natural is to condone it, never to praise it.

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.

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.

The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, I wish you hadn't made every line funny. It's so depressing.

The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze.

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.

You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.

As soon as I put my uniform on, the rest of my life solidified around me like a plaster cast. From that moment on, my friends were anyone who could put up with the disgrace; my occupation, any job from which I was not given the sack; my playground, any cafe or restaurant from which I was not barred or any street corner from which the police did not move me on.

Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): What's the matter, sexy? Don't you like dehydrated fruit?

I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?

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.

To lose is not always failure.

What I wanted most of all was to use sex as a weapon to allure, subjugate, and, if possible, destroy the personality of others.

It was my policy never to spend more than half my wages so as not to have to work for more than half my days on earth.

I did not know that a reputation for wit is earned not by making jokes, but by laughing at the pleasantries of others.

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.

One of the special beauties of America is that it is the only country in the world where you are not advised to learn the language before entering. Before I ever set out for the United States, I asked a friend if I should study American. His answer was unequivocal. "On no account," he said. "The more English you sound, the more likely you are to be believed."

Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH.

The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.

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.

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.

One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.

To live in the past is to miss today's opportunities and tomorrow's blessings.

I never saw Portsmouth by day.

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.

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.

I was from birth an object of mild ridicule because of my movements - especially the perpetual flutter of my hands - and my voice. Like the voices 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. But these natural outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual disgrace were not enough. People could say that I was ignorant of them or was trying without success to hide them. I wanted it to be known that I was not ashamed and therefore had to display symptoms that could not be thought to be accidental.

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.

Flowers are words even a baby can understand.

[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.

Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!

It is hard enough to share wealth without being involved in undignified scenes; shared poverty consists of nothing else.

Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he ... " This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him."

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.

It is no longer possible to be exotic.

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable

Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can't help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. And they don't like that. That's the famous joke: I don't like peas, and I'm glad I don't like them, because if I liked them I would eat them and I hate them.

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

If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.

Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

Exhibitionists have no friends, no friends at all.

All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth.

You will survive if you believe in yourself.

Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality.

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.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper.

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

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

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.