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

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.

Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.

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.

For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.

The trouble with children is that they’re not returnable.

I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to a drama school. And I said, “What did they teach you?” And she said, “They taught me to be a candle burning in an empty room.”

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.

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

You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

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

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

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.

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.

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

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