Quentin Crisp Quotes

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

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?

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.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.

I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. 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.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper.

The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It's not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it's the resentment that settles on your face

If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.

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.

Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.

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.

Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.

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

Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.

I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.

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

Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): "What's the matter, sexy? Don't you like dehydrated fruit?

The very purpose of existence it to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think of us.

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.

Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?

A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.

Vice is its own reward.

I learned very early in life that I was always going to need people more than they needed me.

If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.

As soon as I stepped out of my mother's womb...I realized that I had made a mistake,

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

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

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

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.

Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art...I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.

Style is not the man; it is something better. It is a dizzy, dazzling structure that he erects about himself using as building materials selected elements from his own character.

Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.

The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call “the trouble with you.” Nevertheless, the journey is worth making.

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

Sexual intercourse is a poor substitute for masturbation.

If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.

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.

So black was the way ahead that my progress consisted of long periods of inert despondency punctuated by spasmodic lurches forward towards any small chink of light that I thought I saw ... As the years went by, it did not get lighter but I became accustomed to the dark.

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.

Then my hostess said, "Oh, Denis (as my name was before I dyed it) never plays the part of a man.

There can be no such thing as “philosophical horror”, at least as a premeditated genre. Why? Because philosophy implies enquiry, reflection and an open mind, whereas the genre of horror demands certain conclusions in advance.

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.

It's explained that all relationship 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.

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.

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable

Exhibitionists have no friends, no friends at all.

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

Development of character consists solely in moving towards self-sufficiency.

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

It was only in the idealistic dreams of H.G. Wells that people became nicer as they acquired wealth.

To find something truly alive these days is in itself almost shocking—as shocking as a living doll.

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody. —QUENTIN CRISP

Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who, before anything has reared its ugly head, have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies. The habit fitted snugly into my well-established world of make-believe.

Without knowing it, I was acquiring that haughty bearing which is characteristic of so many eccentrics. What other expression would you expect to find on the face of anyone who knows that if he turns his head too quickly, he will see on the faces of others glares of stark terror or grimaces of hatred? Aloofness is the posture of self-defense.

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

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

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

Mr Melly had to be obscene to be believed

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

Sex is the last resort of the miserable

All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going.

If there were no applause and no criticism, who would you be?

Everyone who is honest is interesting.

Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment but of boredom.

I have this lust for small talk. Nobody escapes my love.

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.

It is no longer possible to be exotic.

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

The increased scale of your operations will lend you respectability.

It was my policy never to spend more than half my wages so as not to have to work for more than half my days on earth.

Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.

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

A clown is a horrible thing to happen to anyone.

There is no Great Dark Man!!!

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

I don't have any pets. I've got enough dumb friends without them.

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.

Even in childhood I was mad about men in uniform.

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.

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.

I have known female whores who spoke very bitterly of their calling. "If they don't like my face, they can put a cushion over it. I know it's not that they're interested in." But to the boys this profession never seemed shameful. It was their daytime occupations for which they felt the need to apologize. In some instances, these were lower class or humdrum or, worst of all, unfeminine. At least whoring was never that.

Lord Snow says that every man may be permitted his own clichés. But this is not enough. He must invent his own clichés and then persist in them until, if other people use them, their source is instantly recognizable. Thus plagiarism shall be turned into homage.

I think I can say without fear of inaccuracy that description is my strong point. Possibly this fact is central to my feeling excluded and so on in what might be called “the scene.” There appears to be a particular divide in literature that has “description” and all it implies, as its focus. Some people hate “fancy writing,” and just want to “cut to the chase,” and so on. This attitude deeply irritates me. If you can’t try and take words to their limit in the field of literature, then where can you? I actually think that variety is good, but it’s usually the enemies of “fancy writing” who also seem to deplore variety and believe that there’s only one way to write—without adverbs etc. etc.

[Sex] is only a mirage, floating in shimmering mockery before the bulging eyes of middle-aged men as they stumble with little whimpers toward the double bed, that somewhere there is a person that will evoke from them sensations of which they dimly dream they are capable.

As soon as I put my uniform on, the rest of my life solidified around me like a plaster cast. From that moment on, my friends were anyone who could put up with the disgrace; my occupation, any job from which I was not given the sack; my playground, any cafe or restaurant from which I was not barred or any street corner from which the police did not move me on.

In the cafe there was a lot of stylized cattiness, but this was never unkindly meant. Nothing at all was meant by it. It was a formal game of innuendos about other people being older than they said, about their teeth being false and their hair being a wig. Such conversation was thought to be smart and so very feminine. It was better, I need hardly say, to seem like a truly appalling woman than not like a woman at all.

My outlook was so limited that I assumed that all deviates were openly despised and rejected. Their grief and their fear drew my melancholy nature strongly. At first I only wanted to wallow in their misery, but, as time went by, I longed to reach its very essence. Finally I desired to represent it. By this process I managed to shift homosexuality from being a burden to being a cause. The weight lifted and some of the guilt evaporated.

When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I had lived in Clerkenwell that the only complete solution to my problem was suicide. I never brought it off. I was afraid. A lifetime of never making positive decisions, accepting instead the lesser of the evils presented to me, had atrophied my will. It was not so much that I longed for death as that I didn't long for life. Emptiness, though, was not a sufficiently definite feeling to lead to a violent act. Instead of sitting in my room and balancing the relative convenience of various ways of ending it all, I ought to have been busy trying to summon up a reasonable amount of despair. Hopelessness was thinly spread like drizzle over my whole outlook. But, in an emergency, I could not find a puddle of despondency deep enough to drown in.

The whole set of stylizations that are known as "camp" (a word that I was hearing then for the first time) was, in 1926, self-explanatory. Women moved and gesticulated in this way. Homosexuals wished for obvious reasons to copy them. The strange thing about "camp" is that it has been fossilized. The mannerisms have never changed. If I were now to see a woman sitting with her knees clamped together, one hand on her hip and the other lightly touching her back hair, I should think, "Either she scored her last social triumph in 1926 or it is a man in drag.

Perhaps "camp" is set in the 'twenties because after that differences between the sexes - especially visible differences - began to fade. This, of course, has never mattered to women in the least. They know they are women. To homosexuals, who must, with every breath they draw, with every step they take, demonstrate that they are feminine, it is frustrating. They look back in sorrow to that more formal era and try to relive it.

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

I asked many people why they drank so much but never received an explanation that I fully understood. It was the tales of their escapades while under the influence of drink that brought me nearest to comprehending their need for it. It seemed to give them a few hours of freedom from rules which, during the rest of their lives they reluctantly obeyed. If this was true, then in the example of my life lay a cure for drunkenness, though it was hardly an answer which Harley Street would have approved. The prophylactic is, never to conform at all.

The average woman, unless she is particularly ill-favored, regards loving and being loved as a normal part of life. If a man says he loves her she believes him. Indeed some women are convinced they are adored by men who can be seen by all to be running in the opposite direction. For homosexuals this is not so. Love and admiration have to be won against heavy odds. Any declaration of affection requires proof. So many approaches made to them are insincere - even hostile. What better proof of love can there be than money? A ten-shilling note showed incontrovertibly just how mad about you a man is. Even in the minds of some women a confusion exists between love and money if the quantity is large enough. They evade the charge of mercenariness by using the cash they extort from one man to deal a bludgeoning blow of humiliation upon another. Some homosexuals attempt this gambit, but it is risky. The giving of money is a masculine act and blurs the internal image.

I was from birth an object of mild ridicule because of my movements - especially the perpetual flutter of my hands - and my voice. Like the voices of a number of homosexuals, this is an insinuating blend of eagerness and caution in which even such words as "hello" and "goodbye" seem not so much uttered as divulged. But these natural outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual disgrace were not enough. People could say that I was ignorant of them or was trying without success to hide them. I wanted it to be known that I was not ashamed and therefore had to display symptoms that could not be thought to be accidental.