Top 160 Quentin Crisp Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “I have this lust for small talk. Nobody escapes my love.”

— Quentin Crisp

102. “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.”

— Quentin Crisp

103. “You see, the universe has no meaning and there was no purpose in my being born into it. I never listen to conversations which begin, ‘We are all put into the world for... ’ because we weren’t put into the world. We just happened and we have no purpose and that’s fine.”

— Quentin Crisp

104. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

107. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

109. “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

110. “There is no Great Dark Man!!!”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

112. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

130. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

134. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

137. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

141. “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

142. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

145. “There is no dark man.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

147. “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

148. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp