Quentin Crisp Quotes

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

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.

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

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

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

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

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.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

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

Nearly always when actors are approached by the beauticians, they try to avoid the dabs that the beauticians put on their faces. They dodge them.

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

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

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.

Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.

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.

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

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.

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.

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

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

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

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.

Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.

It may be true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance, but it's also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts.

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.

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

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

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

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

To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

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.

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

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 very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.

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

To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.

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.

In England, nobody's your friend.

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

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

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.

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

It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.

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?

Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings, they did it by killing all those who opposed them. If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.

Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

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.

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

What is privacy if not for invading?