I don’t like peas, and I’m glad I don’t like them, because if I liked them I would eat them and I hate them.
QUENTIN CRISPThe more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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I don’t really act. I say the words the way I would say them if I meant them.
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If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.
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Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.
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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 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.
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Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.
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The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.
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The more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches.
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I never spend my time doing anything I’ll have to do again tomorrow.
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No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
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Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
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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.
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The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.
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A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.
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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.
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If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.
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What my parents thought of this, I don’t know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.
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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.
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Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.
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Women have decided to be people, which is a great mistake. Women were nicer than people.
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Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically – for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist – but then what isn’t?
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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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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.
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Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
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To lose is not always failure.
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The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
QUENTIN CRISP