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 CRISPWomen have decided to be people, which is a great mistake. Women were nicer than people.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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.
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I never spend my time doing anything I’ll have to do again tomorrow.
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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
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Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.
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He knew them only ‘in Braille’ – the curtains were never drawn back in the rooms in Oxford where he met those boys. It was the most sordid life you can imagine. And he was bleating about love and dragging the fair name of Mr. Plato into the trial – after a life like that?
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In England, nobody’s your friend.
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My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
QUENTIN CRISP -
To lose is not always failure.
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People say to me, “When did you come out?” But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I’d found in an attic, saying, “I am a beautiful princess!”
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An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
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Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret.
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There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.
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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.
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Happiness is the only thing I understand.
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Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.
QUENTIN CRISP






