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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Regretting he wasn't born a woman:
I'd have opened a knitting shop in Carlisle and been a part of life.
Quentin Crisp
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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.
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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
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In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
Quentin Crisp
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To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
Quentin Crisp
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Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.
Quentin Crisp
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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.
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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.
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Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.
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In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.
Quentin Crisp
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When stripped, I looked less like "Il David" than a plucked chicken that died of myxomatosis.
Quentin Crisp
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Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality.
Quentin Crisp
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Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.
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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
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Quote of the day
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
Edvard Munch
Quentin Crisp
Creative Commons
Born:
December 25, 1908
Died:
November 21, 1999
(aged 90)
Bio:
Quentin Crisp was an English writer and raconteur.
Known for:
The Naked Civil Servant (1975)
Orlando (1992)
Homo Heights (1998)
The Bride (1985)
Most used words:
life
people
time
sake
level
lived
love
joneses
sex
girls
room
years
drag
asked
man
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