Quentin Crisp Quotes

71 Sourced Quotes

There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

Quentin Crisp
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.

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

Quentin Crisp
'You talk for talking's sake,' she hissed. I asked if that was bad. 'I mean it,' the girl replied. 'You talk for talking's sake.' I had heard her the first time and had understood the words but not the contempt with which they were charged. 'Would you be equally annoyed,' I asked, 'if I danced for dancing's sake? […] I should have said, 'Would you hate me if I lived for living's sake?' This would have been the total question — the one to which a full reply could have saved the world.

Quentin Crisp
The time comes for everyone to do deliberately what he used to do by mistake If you are effeminate by nature, you have to find some way of telling the world that you know you are, otherwise they keep telling you.

Quentin Crisp
A gentleman doesn't pounce... he glides.

Quentin Crisp
I acquiesced in this on the grounds that the most anyone can expect from a holiday is a change of agony.

Quentin Crisp
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.

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

Quentin Crisp
Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

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

Quentin Crisp
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing.

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
Life is the funny thing that happens to you on the way to the grave.

Quentin Crisp
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."

Quentin Crisp
When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I lived in Clerkenwell that the only complete solution to my problems was suicide. I never brought it off. I was afraid... Hopelessness was thinly spread like a drizzle over my whole outlook. But, in an emergency, I could not find a puddle of despondency deep enough to drown in.

Quentin Crisp
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.

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

Quentin Crisp
"You'll never be wanted," [a draft board official] said, and thrust at me a smaller piece of paper. This described me as being incapable of being graded in grades A, B, etc., because I suffered from sexual perversion. When the story of my disgrace became one of the contemporary fables of Chelsea, a certain Miss Marshall said, "I don't much care for the expression 'suffering from.' Shouldn't it be 'glorying in'?"

Quentin Crisp
Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbours.

Quentin Crisp
To read a novel or see a play was to drink life through a straw — to smoke it through a filter-tip. If we were not afraid of blackening our teeth or riddling our lungs with cancer — if we were a dauntless race of men with strong digestions — we would be able to devour life without the aid of these over-civilized devices.

Quentin Crisp
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.

Quentin Crisp
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.

Quentin Crisp
The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn't even want the beastly thing.

Quentin Crisp
Wherever I am on this earth, I am and shall always be only a resident alien. People are never with me, they are always in my presence. I am never involved in conversation, I am always being interviewed.

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
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.

Quentin Crisp
Regretting he wasn't born a woman:
I'd have opened a knitting shop in Carlisle and been a part of life.

Quentin Crisp
There are girls who do not like real life... Some of these girls are innocent enough to think that these unreal friendships [with homosexuals] will lead to true love — a kind of sexual intercourse that will happen to them without their having to take too horribly much notice. Even those who are sufficiently sophisticated to know that this will not be so persist in these relationships. They provide an opportunity to lavish emotion on a pseudo-man without paying the price that in heterosexual circumstances would be inevitable.

Quentin Crisp
Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who... have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies.

Quentin Crisp