Quentin S. Crisp Quotes

I grew up with tarot cards and the reading of tea leaves.

We all know about the car breaking down on a deserted road scenario. That's cliché. I'm thinking more of Cider with Rosie, as in, the dark side.

If there is innocence on Earth again, I tend to imagine it in more [Henry David]Thoreau sort of terms.

I think the seventies caught the last red rays of the dying sun of this innocence, but were already a little cold and drab.

I think I'm probably too close to the seventies to be able to analyse them (it?) effectively.

I seem to be less depressed but also less hopeful now in my thirties. My widow's peak bothers me. I think a lot about the end of the human race. And so on.

This strong sense of who I am that I've always had, since I was very young, is what makes me write.

The quality of that 'who I am', is what I hope comes out in the writing.

I would say that, apart from being a writer, I have also always been very conscious of the idea of a 'world elsewhere'.

In the meditation, of course, the question is repeated and repeated until you run out of answers - or so I hear.

I don't believe in sexual love.

I've drifted in and out of vegetarianism for years.

I have a bit of a struggle with some aspects of or forms of Buddhism, but Zen I find to be mainly congenial.

People didn't talk about paedophiles in the seventies, I don't think.

Lots of things were there [in the seventies], in the social experience, but not quite named, lurking like a stranger on the edge of the playground.

Speaking of [Philip] Larkin, in his poem about the First World War he wrote something like, "Never such innocence, before or since, that turned itself to past without a word".

I associate my childhood with two things, mainly: the North Devon countryside and a sense of connection to another world.

It's interesting, the sense of pastoral utopia that exists in so much fantasy - in [Edward ] Dunsany, [John R.R.] Tolkien and so on.

I think the natural is, for many people, the gateway to something supernatural or otherworldly.

I suppose I could say that to be interested in innocence already suggests a remove from innocence, perhaps a longing for something that is lost.

1977 was also, of course, the year that Derek Jarman made his iconoclastic film Jubilee, which was so much part of the punk movement.

We're all more or less interested in the 'swinging sixties', of course, but that's not what I mean. I'm interested in the particular naive glamour that clings to the post-war and pre-Hendrix era.

It's true that Eastern philosophy and religion were not unknown to me as a child, since my father has explored much in that area, and written books more or less in that area, too.

I do not think that my spiritual apprehensions are as dogmatically cultural as those of many people who have been brought up strictly in a particular tradition.

You might call this innocence. I had a sense of another world that had not been spoken of to me.

I did not understand the differences between Catholic and Protestant until I was an adult.

I never went to church as a child. I did not .

I'm not claiming anything like sainthood - merely a native perception.

I suppose what I can say is that I do feel I have a natural spiritual sensibility.

The cultural products of America from this period [ fifties and sixties] are like a vision of paradise or something. I find it utterly intoxicating.

My favourite tea is lapsang souchong.

I'm more a dog person than a cat person.

I grew up in North Devon, by the sea, and feel a special affinity for the landscape there, despite a lack of actual ancestry.

I was born in the seventies, age of bad haircuts and grainy colour photos.

I've never been baptised.

[My muse] is, in fact, a woman of the world, and precisely because of this, hopes that a diversity of cultures will endure, and that one bland monoculture does not swamp everything.

If we do want to do that [ colonise space to survive, ], then vacuous materialism is not going to be enough for us.

If we do overcome linear time, I would hope this means dwelling more directly in the fertility of the imagination rather than denying it, as some aspects of Buddhism seem to.

Some Buddhists, however, never seem to get past the void, and I suppose I view this as a kind of Buddhist 'Old Testament' that I don't especially like.

I seemed to recall some words from an old Zen master, something like, "My Zen cuts down mountains." My rejection of Buddhism was a cutting down of mountains; that is precisely how it felt to me.

Non-pantheist models for god seem almost completely untenable to me, though not without interest.

The peculiar thing is that, in focusing only on the here and now, Buddhism seems to despise the world.

The imagination is fertile. From seeds of the imagination, much is made manifest.

There's a strong aspect of Buddhism which is geared towards ending all fertility.

People may wish to say that the thing that is in conflict with my creativity is not Buddhism - that's fine.

Anyway, to cut off one's biological dreams seems to me the most fundamental form of psychic castration that you could imagine.

I really think [William] Burroughs was onto something here, when he said, "Dreams are a biologic necessity and your lifeline into space."

In terms of what is expressed, antinatalism is a strong presence, not always explicit, in what I write.

It would be hard to say that exactly, but antinatalism is a reality in my life, not just an interesting idea. I can feel it in the chilled and weary marrow of my bones.

I went for a walk in the rain. Recently, whenever it rains, I feel like I want to go for a walk.