Famous Quentin Crisp Quotations

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"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."
by 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."
by Quentin Crisp
"Even holligans marry, though they know that marriage is but for a little while. It is alimony that is forever."
by Quentin Crisp
"Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigour. With such people the grey head is but the impression of the old fellow's hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life."
by Quentin Crisp
"For flavor, instant sex will never supercede the stuff you have to peel and cook."
by Quentin Crisp
"Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors."
by Quentin Crisp
"If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style."
by Quentin Crisp
"Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation to which the filing system has been lost?"
by 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."
by Quentin Crisp
"Life was a funny thing that occured on the way to the grave."
by Quentin Crisp
"Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone- but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding."
by Quentin Crisp
"Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level."
by Quentin Crisp
"Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress."
by Quentin Crisp
"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."
by Quentin Crisp
"One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend."
by Quentin Crisp
"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."
by Quentin Crisp
"The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity."
by 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."
by Quentin Crisp
"To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody."
by Quentin Crisp
"Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster."
by 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"
by Quentin Crisp
"I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises."
by Quentin Crisp
"Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making."
by 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."
by Quentin Crisp
"This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there."
by 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."
by Quentin Crisp
"An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing."
by Quentin Crisp
"Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave."
by Quentin Crisp
"Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender."
by Quentin Crisp
"Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?"
by Quentin Crisp
"My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it."
by Quentin Crisp
"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."
by 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."
by 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."
by Quentin Crisp
"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."
by Quentin Crisp


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