Top 160 Quentin Crisp Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I don’t hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

57. “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

58. “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

59. “You first have to find who you are. Then, you have to be it like mad.”

— Quentin Crisp

60. “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

61. “I never saw Portsmouth by day.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

63. “Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.”

— Quentin Crisp

64. “To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

66. “The trouble with children is that they’re not returnable.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

68. “Now I’ve done and said all I can do and say. I’ve come to the end of my personality, and now if I want anything it’s peace, quiet. The ability, the opportunity to stay in my room and just stagger on. I suppose what I want, in a way, is death.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

70. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

71. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

73. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

75. “I don’t have any pets. I’ve got enough dumb friends without them.”

— Quentin Crisp

76. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

77. “Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH.”

— Quentin Crisp

78. “I became one of the stately homos of England.”

— Quentin Crisp

79. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

80. “To lose is not always failure.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

82. “To live in the past is to miss today’s opportunities and tomorrow’s blessings.”

— Quentin Crisp

83. “The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.”

— Quentin Crisp

84. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

86. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

88. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

89. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

90. “I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!”

— Quentin Crisp

91. “The place where no harm can come is the place where nothing at all can come.”

— Quentin Crisp

92. “The court was not previously aware of the prisoner’s many accomplishments. In view of these, we see fit to impose the death penalty.”

— Quentin Crisp

93. “Humor I think of as the outward sign of the ability to look at events and situations from more than one point of view. It is this gift that keeps us all from living in a perpetual rage.”

— Quentin Crisp

94. “Exhibitionists have no friends, no friends at all.”

— Quentin Crisp

95. “Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going.”

— Quentin Crisp

96. “Zealots are totally incapable of any emotion other than rage. It is an unalterable law that people who claim to care about the human race are utterly indifferent to the sufferings of individuals.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

99. “It was my policy never to spend more than half my wages so as not to have to work for more than half my days on earth.”

— Quentin Crisp

100. “Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment but of boredom.”

— Quentin Crisp