Top 160 Quentin Crisp Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

156. “Vice is its own reward.”

— Quentin Crisp

157. “Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.”

— Quentin Crisp

158. “Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality.”

— Quentin Crisp

159. “Among other objections to the image of me was that I hated animals. I still do. I have enough dumb friends without them.”

— Quentin Crisp

160. “I played all games seriously, even nastily. They provided me an enclosed world whose triumphs compensated me somewhat for a life of defeat elsewhere.”

— Quentin Crisp

161. “All this cut-price transcendentalism does not prevent California from being a startlingly physical state. This becomes most obvious where Los Angeles saunters down to the sea. The region is called Venice.”

— Quentin Crisp

162. “It was not so much that I longed for death as that I didn’t long for life.”

— Quentin Crisp

163. “I did not know that a reputation for wit is earned not by making jokes, but by laughing at the pleasantries of others.”

— Quentin Crisp

164. “To say a thing is natural is to condone it, never to praise it.”

— Quentin Crisp

165. “The gymnasiacs of Venice, in California, are so addicted to these practices that there has arisen a nation of men who can no longer put their arms against their sides.”

— Quentin Crisp

166. “It is hard enough to share wealth without being involved in undignified scenes; shared poverty consists of nothing else.”

— Quentin Crisp

167. “A clown is a horrible thing to happen to anyone.”

— Quentin Crisp

168. “I do what I like anyhow any time. My life is one long holiday.”

— Quentin Crisp

169. “A little old lady once said to me, ‘I have known a great many men. All of them had to be carried every step of the way.”

— Quentin Crisp

170. “The monasteries of Bohemia demand more of their brotherhood than some are prepared to give. The daily routine of back-breaking idleness proves too much for certain novices. The self-inflicted orgies that are the inevitable punishment for the slightest deviation into the bourgeois way of life are more than their frail flesh can stand. Many discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots, and greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope.”

— Quentin Crisp

171. “There are a lot of people in the world who are not loved and we must make an inconspicuous dash to them to save them, to help them. To live a life and not be loved is a terrible thing. And we can spare them that if we are attentive.”

— Quentin Crisp

172. “Brave men hide their deeds as decent folk their alms. They disguise them or make excuses for them.”

— Quentin Crisp

173. “Drawing is a science, painting is just something for the long winter evenings.”

— Quentin Crisp

174. “It is no longer possible to be exotic.”

— Quentin Crisp

175. “Even in childhood I was mad about men in uniform.”

— Quentin Crisp

176. “The increased scale of your operations will lend you respectability.”

— Quentin Crisp

177. “My fingers will not type the words ‘her money became a burden to her’ but I do think that her wealth was like a lazy servant – better than nothing but a source of unremitting annoyance because it never filled her most urgent needs.”

— Quentin Crisp

179. “What I wanted most of all was to use sex as a weapon to allure, subjugate, and, if possible, destroy the personality of others.”

— Quentin Crisp