To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
QUENTIN CRISPPeople 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!”
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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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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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Vice is its own reward.
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One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.
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I never saw Portsmouth by day.
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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.
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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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Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?
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It’s been agony but I couldn’t have done it any other way.
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The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it
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To live in the past is to miss today’s opportunities and tomorrow’s blessings.
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Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.
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To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
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Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who…have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies.
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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 trouble with children is that they’re not returnable.
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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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It may be true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance, but it’s also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts.
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Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
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Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.
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If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.
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The flagrantly gay Quentin Crisp dealt with homophobic bullying by refusing to bow to its onslaught. His number listed in the phone directory, he responded to derogatory remarks accompanied with a stated intent to kill him by asking, “Would you like to make an appointment?”
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Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret.
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When I was young, we thought that Oscar Wilde was a great nobleman who had thrown his life away for love. Nothing could be less true. He slept with East Enders who were procured for him by Lord Alfred Douglas.
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I had a friend who had two degrees of being made up: when invited I would say ‘Can I make up?’ and he would say ‘Oh yes – tinted?’, or he would say, ‘Oh yes – clotted?’
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Manners are love in a cool climate.
QUENTIN CRISP