Quentin Crisp Quotes

71 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Quentin Crisp
Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.

Quentin Crisp
He explained to me that he wanted a simple boy-meets-girl story with lyrics. This I felt was quite beyond my capabilities. I did not know any boys who met girls.

Quentin Crisp
I now know that if you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be 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.

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

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

Quentin Crisp
When stripped, I looked less like "Il David" than a plucked chicken that died of myxomatosis.

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

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

Quentin Crisp
Many [hooligans] discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots and, greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope. The fathers superior of the order do not try to influence their children in Satan; they merely shake their heads in sorrow. They know that the apostate must work out his own damnation.

Quentin Crisp