Quentin crisp quotes

To lose is not always failure.

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.

One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

The flagrantly gay Quentin Crisp dealt with homophobic bullying by refusing to bow to its onslaught. His number listed in the phone directory, he responded to derogatory remarks accompanied with a stated intent to kill him by asking, "Would you like to make an appointment?"

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

If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

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.

Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.

To live in the past is to miss today's opportunities and tomorrow's blessings.

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.

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

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?'

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

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

The trouble with European cities is that they are drenched in their history, almost all of which is terrible.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 (to handsome young man on the street): "What's the matter, sexy? Don't you like dehydrated fruit?

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.

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.

Flowers are words even a baby can understand.

You can't be a person and a lady. If you're a person, you can open the damned door yourself.

The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call “the trouble with you.” Nevertheless, the journey is worth making.

Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH.

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

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically - for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist - but then what isn't?

The trouble with children is that they're 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.

Happiness is the only thing I understand.

Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.

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.

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

People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.

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.

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.

In England, nobody's your friend.

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 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.

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.

The absolute nothingness of death is a blessing. Something to look forward to.

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.

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

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

I've never not been famous.

I never spend my time doing anything I'll have to do again tomorrow.

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

It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.

Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.

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

Vice is its own reward.

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.

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

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.

It's a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.

When I was young, I and the whole world thought that all homosexuals were effeminate. And of course they're not. You can just see which people are effeminate; that's the only difference. So, I became a prototype of the effeminate man, because I was conspicuously effeminate. But camp is not something I do, it's something I am.

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

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

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

Manners are love in a cool climate.

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

I don't really act. I say the words the way I would say them if I meant them.

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

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.

I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.

The measure of woman's distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr's crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.

Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.

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.

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.)

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

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.

You should make no effort to try to join society, stay right where you are. Give your name and serial number and wait for society to come to you.

The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.

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

Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.

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.

I never say 'No' to anything.

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

Never get involved with someone who wants to change you

The ... problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a "real" man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who "goes with" other men is not what they would call a real man. The conundrum is incapable of resolution, but that does not make homosexuals give it up.

People say to me, "When did you come out?" But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I'd found in an attic, saying, "I am a beautiful princess!" What my parents thought of this, I don't know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

The message that 'love' will solve all of our problems is repeated incessantly in contemporary culture - like a philosophical tom tom. It would be closer to the truth to say that love is a contagious and virulent disease which leaves a victim in a state of near imbecility, paralysis, profound melancholia, and sometimes culminates in death.

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.

You will survive if you believe in yourself.

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.

Women have decided to be people, which is a great mistake. Women were nicer than people.

You don't have to deal with anyone in America. They accept you the way you are.

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

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

When I was young, we thought that Oscar Wilde was a great nobleman who had thrown his life away for love. Nothing could be less true. He slept with East Enders who were procured for him by Lord Alfred Douglas. He knew them only 'in Braille' - the curtains were never drawn back in the rooms in Oxford where he met those boys. It was the most sordid life you can imagine. And he was bleating about love and dragging the fair name of Mr. Plato into the trial - after a life like that?

You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.

If I were God - and I never understand why I'm not - I should say, "Shop around, I don't think you'll find a better bargain than here."

The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.

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.

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

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

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.

I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do?

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.

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

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.

To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.

In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!

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.

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

Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.

When asked, 'Shall I tell my mother I'm gay?', I reply, 'Never tell your mother anything.

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.

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.

If you don't stay in some days, you can't recharge your batteries.

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.

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

The more people one has to love, the more one's capacity to love stretches.

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

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

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.

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

It may be true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance, but it's also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts.