Quentin Crisp Quotes, Sayings, Remarks, Thoughts and Speeches
Quentin Crisp Quotes and Sayings
- 1
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 2
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 3
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 4
Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 5
Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 6
For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 7
For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 8
Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 9
However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 10
I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 11
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 12
If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 13
In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 14
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 15
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 16
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 17
It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 18
Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 19
Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 20
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 21
Manners are love in a cool climate.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 22
Men get laid, but women get screwed.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 23
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 24
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 25
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 26
Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 27
Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 28
The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 29
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 30
The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 31
The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 32
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 33
The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 34
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 35
The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 36
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 37
There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 38
Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 39
To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 40
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 41
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
- 42
You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
Quentin Crisp | Refcard PDF ↑
