Top 160 Quentin Crisp Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Mr Melly had to be obscene to be believed.”

— Quentin Crisp

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

106. “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

107. “I have come to think that both sex and politics are a mistake and that any attempt to establish a connection between the two is the greatest error of all.”

— Quentin Crisp

108. “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

109. “Men get laid, but women get screwed.”

— Quentin Crisp

110. “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

111. “Other-cheekism is not only a way of purifying the soul, it is also part of every weak person’s survival kit.”

— Quentin Crisp

112. “People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.”

— Quentin Crisp

113. “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

114. “Any film is at least better than real life.”

— Quentin Crisp

115. “I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to “Hamlet” on the grounds that I knew who won.”

— Quentin Crisp

116. “Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbors.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

118. “What better proof of love can there be than money? A ten-shilling note shows incontrovertibly just how mad about you a man is.”

— Quentin Crisp

119. “I recommend limiting one’s involvement in other people’s lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.”

— Quentin Crisp

120. “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

121. “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

122. “The more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

124. “What is privacy if not for invading?”

— Quentin Crisp

125. “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

126. “The proprietor had hair so red that pigmentation had flowed out into every visible inch of his skin and even into the pinks of his eyes, as the colour of flowering cherry trees stains their leaves.”

— Quentin Crisp

127. “You must make small steps into the air of being yourself. Find yourself in an empty landscape, build your character, and then spend the rest of your life demonstrating it.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

130. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

131. “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

132. “Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

134. “It’s been agony but I couldn’t have done it any other way.”

— Quentin Crisp

135. “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

136. “There is no dark man.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

138. “Fear and hatred do not seem to find expression in tears.”

— Quentin Crisp

139. “Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.”

— Quentin Crisp

140. “The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds is just so unlikely I can’t go along with it.”

— Quentin Crisp

141. “Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.”

— Quentin Crisp

142. “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

143. “The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze.”

— Quentin Crisp

144. “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

145. “Vice is its own reward.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

148. “Whereas in the twentieth century, there was a distinction between men and women, in the twenty-first century the lines of gender will become more and more blurred.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp