Quentin Crisp famous quotes

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

#Being Yourself #Fashion #Teenage

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Gay #Thinking #Proud

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

#Inspirational #Levels #Dignity

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

#Love #Funny #Sex

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Happiness #Effort #Enormous

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

#Life #Funny Things #Way

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

#Love #Life #Relationship

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Want #British #Impression

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Success #Moving #Character

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Relationship #Marriage #Successful

The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it
-- Quentin Crisp

#Curiosity #Individuality #Neighbor

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

#Fashion #Style #Able

Men get laid, but women get screwed.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Sex #Women #Sassy

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Average #Missing #Stories

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Inspirational #Running #Years

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Forgiving #Despise

The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Sex #War #Sleep

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?
-- Quentin Crisp

#Peace #Atheist #Believe

If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Men #Garden #Soul

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Thinking #Way #Emotion

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

#Funny #Sarcastic #Men

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Writing #Realist #Satirist

I learned very early in life that I was always going to need people more than they needed me
-- Quentin Crisp

#People

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

#Actors #Manhattan #Stage

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Mean #Enemy #Threat

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Truth #Communication #Language

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Inspirational Life #Want #World

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

#Blame #Praise

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Addresses #Sides #Outcast

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

#Funny #Success #Sarcastic

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Book #Reading #Way

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Teenage #Parent #Rebel

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Hilarious #Thinking #Glowing

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

#Flirty #House #World

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.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Relationship #Giving #Demand

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

#Mother #Fathers Day #Dad

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

#Love #Sex #Destiny

Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can't help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. And they don't like that. That's the famous joke: I don't like peas, and I'm glad I don't like them, because if I liked them I would eat them and I hate them.
-- Quentin Crisp

#Hate #Men #Thinking