Top 160 Quentin Crisp Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

2. “If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

5. “Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.”

— Quentin Crisp

6. “Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.”

— Quentin Crisp

7. “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

8. “You will survive if you believe in yourself.”

— Quentin Crisp

9. “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

10. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

12. “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

13. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

14. “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?””

— Quentin Crisp

15. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

19. “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

20. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

22. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

24. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

25. “Never get involved with someone who wants to change you.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

27. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

28. “Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

33. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

36. “The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It’s not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it’s the resentment that settles on your face.”

— Quentin Crisp

37. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

40. “Manners are love in a cool climate.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

42. “I am the last of Britain’s stately homos.”

— Quentin Crisp

43. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

45. “If you truly love me, kill the bartender.”

— Quentin Crisp

46. “I learned very early in life that I was always going to need people more than they needed me.”

— Quentin Crisp

47. “If there were no applause and no criticism, who would you be?”

— Quentin Crisp

48. “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

49. “I never saw Portsmouth by day.”

— Quentin Crisp

50. “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?”

— Quentin Crisp