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
QUENTIN CRISPNo effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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The measure of woman’s distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr’s crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
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Happiness is the only thing I understand.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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 -
Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together,
QUENTIN CRISP -
Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Manners are love in a cool climate.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
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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.
QUENTIN CRISP






