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.
QUENTIN CRISPIn Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
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I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.
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When asked, ‘Shall I tell my mother I’m gay?’, I reply, ‘Never tell your mother anything.
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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.
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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.
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Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
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I’m happy to say she was laughing while she said it, but she meant it. I’ve never learned to be a candle burning in an empty room. So I go on the screen, and I say whatever I’m told to say.
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I’ve never not been famous.
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The more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches.
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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.
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The … problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a “real” man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who “goes with” other men is not what they would call a real man. The conundrum is incapable of resolution, but that does not make homosexuals give it up.
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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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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
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Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
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A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.
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Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
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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,
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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.
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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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You can’t be a person and a lady. If you’re a person, you can open the damned door yourself.
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Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
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Never get involved with someone who wants to change you
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People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.
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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.
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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.
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Vice is its own reward.
QUENTIN CRISP