Quentin Crisp quotes:

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

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.

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.

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.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.

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.

It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.

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.

For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

Manners are love in a cool climate.

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

However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.

The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.

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.

Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he..." This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him."

Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.

For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

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.

Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is for a little while. It is alimony that is for ever.

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.

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.

The proprietor had hair so red that pigmentation had flowed out into every visible inch of his skin and even into the pinks of his eyes, as the colour of flowering cherry trees stains their leaves.

A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.

I don't think you can really be proud of being gay because it isn't something you've done. You can only be proud of not being ashamed.

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

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

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?

I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.

You see, astrology is like fortune-telling. If you can't get it right, you say, "Well, if Venus was doing something peculiar in the background, that would alter your prognostication--because, of course, astrology is rubbish.

Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings, they did it by killing all those who opposed them. If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough.

The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze.

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

You will survive if you believe in yourself.

I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.

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.

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?

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.

Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.

Los Angeles is just New York lying down.

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

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.

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

I now realize that education is a last wild effort on the part of the authorities to prevent an overdose of leisure from driving the world mad. Learning is no longer an improver; it is merely the most expensive time-filler the world has ever known.

I lost the love of all the homosexuals in the world by saying that Princess Diana was trash and got what she deserved. She could have been Queen of England - and she was swanning about Paris with Arabs. What disgraceful behavior. Going about saying she wanted to be the queen of hearts. The vulgarity of it is so overpowering.

I never saw Portsmouth by day.

If one is not going to take the necessary precautions to avoid having parents, one must undertake to bring them up.

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.

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

Vice is its own reward.

I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned

You should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster

Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.

Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art...I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a 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.

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.

Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

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.

I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share

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.

What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person.

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.

One of the special beauties of America is that it is the only country in the world where you are not advised to learn the language before entering. Before I ever set out for the United States, I asked a friend if I should study American. His answer was unequivocal. "On no account," he said. "The more English you sound, the more likely you are to be believed."

If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.

If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.

Abatement in the hostility of one's enemies must never be thought to signify they have been won over. It only means that one has ceased to constitute a threat.

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

All America is much the same.

All this cut-price transcendentalism does not prevent California from being a startlingly physical state. This becomes most obvious where Los Angeles saunters down to the sea. The region is called Venice.

America believes in freedom. The English don't believe in it. They don't believe in happiness.

Any film is at least better than real life.

As a test of the closeness of your relationship with the world, sex could never be a patch on being murdered. (That's when someone really does risk his life for you.)

As far as I know, you can fancy someone, you can enjoy their company or you can wish them well. But what being in love is, I don't know.

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

As soon as a person takes a part as a homosexual, the press says, "What do your wife and children think of this?" And the actor never says, "Well, last week I was a murderer, and the week before that I was a child molester, and the week before that I was a lunatic. But now I'm a homosexual."

As we all know from witnessing the consuming jealousy of husbands who are never faithful, people do not confine themselves to the emotions to which they are entitled.

Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?

Assoon as I stepped out of my mother's womb on to dry land, I realized that I had made a mistake?but the trouble with children is that they are not returnable.

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.

Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.

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

Britain cherishes her eccentrics and wisely holds that the function of government is to build a walled garden in which anarchy can flourish.

Central Europe is full of little countries standing shoulder to shoulder with no window to the sea. They are like the passengers in a rush-hour train which has stopped between stations for three centuries. And they all hate one another. And they're all crushed together waving their national flags, clanking their national chains, jabbering their national language.

Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

Did you know that Allah promises you a seat in Paradise if you kill a Christian?

England is very dreary, but I'm a people person.

Europeans are quarrelsome.

Europeans have quarrelled since the beginning of time.

Every day someone notices me and waves to me, or stops and speaks to me, or asks me for an autograph, or photographs me.

Everybody who's been on television more than once wears in public an expression of fatuous affability. Because you may be addressed at any moment by somebody.

Exhibitionists have no friends, no friends at all.

Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained. If you have no personality, you may be able to save your face and, possibly, your entire anatomy by following the current fashion, but all we shall know about you, when we see you coming down the street, is that you had enough money to buy a glossy magazine and were sufficiently cunning to work out the cut of the garments shown therein.

Fear and hatred do not seem to find expression in tears.

Flowers are words even a baby can understand.

God is so angry. All that power, and so mean with it.

God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen. It had become obvious that he was never going to do a thing I said.

Happiness is the only thing I understand.

Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.

I am a stereotype. I am an effeminate man.

I am asked how to remain young, and I say 'Never, never work.' And that, of course, is the secret of it.

I am the last of Britain's stately homos.

I am told that you regret not what you did but what you didn't do; and so that's why I do everything, so as not to have any regrets.

I approach my life with logic. I do not act on impulse or emotion. I very seldom find that I say, 'And then I can't think what came over me, but I did this or that or the other.' I nearly always know how I will act and I nearly always act in that way. I don't catch myself out in embarrassing situations because I've acted without forethought. I calculate what I will do.

I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to a drama school. And I said, "What did they teach you?" And she said, "They taught me to be a candle burning in an empty room." I'm happy to say she was laughing while she said it, but she meant it. I've never learned to be a candle burning in an empty room. So I go on the screen, and I say whatever I'm told to say.

I became one of the stately homos of England.

I came first to America in 1977 at the invitation of a man who wanted to make my life story into a musical. But my agent said it was not to be and it was never done. So I went back, but I'd seen New York, and I wanted to live there. Because everybody talks to you in the street. See, nobody talks to you in England.