Top 160 Quentin Crisp Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

55. “Whatever has gone on in the outer world has passed me by. But I think if anyone said to me, ‘if you go on like this life will pass you by,’ I would reply, ’thank God for that, I nearly got mixed up in the beastly thing.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

57. “I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

63. “God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen.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

64. “To lose is not always failure.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

67. “It doesn’t matter what other people think of you. What matters is what you think of yourself.”

— Quentin Crisp

68. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

70. “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

71. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

72. “When I was a child my ineptitude was a burden to my parents and my teachers. They could not see that it was a greater burden to me. I wondered wanly if I would ever discover how to do anything well. At long last I have learned something even better – how not to do anything at all.”

— Quentin Crisp

73. “I am consumed perpetually by an inner spiritual flame.”

— Quentin Crisp

74. “The scheme entered her head presumably because nature abhors a vacuum.”

— Quentin Crisp

75. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

76. “Los Angeles is just New York lying down.”

— Quentin Crisp

77. “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

78. “There is no Great Dark Man!!!”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

82. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

84. “My function in life was to render clear what was already blindingly conspicuous.”

— Quentin Crisp

85. “I don’t hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.”

— Quentin Crisp

86. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

87. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

88. “Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone – but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.”

— Quentin Crisp

89. “Flowers are words even a baby can understand.”

— Quentin Crisp

90. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

92. “The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.”

— Quentin Crisp

93. “Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

95. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

97. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

98. “Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.”

— Quentin Crisp

99. “This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp