My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
QUENTIN CRISPWhat my parents thought of this, I don’t know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
QUENTIN CRISP -
He knew them only ‘in Braille’ – the curtains were never drawn back in the rooms in Oxford where he met those boys. It was the most sordid life you can imagine. And he was bleating about love and dragging the fair name of Mr. Plato into the trial – after a life like that?
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While I have very little to say in favor of sex (it’s vastly overrated, it’s frequently unnecessary, and it’s messy), it is greatly to be preferred to the interminable torments of romantic agony through which two people tear one another limb from limb while professing altruistic devotion.
QUENTIN CRISP -
To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
QUENTIN CRISP -
You don’t have to deal with anyone in America. They accept you the way you are.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Vice is its own reward.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
QUENTIN CRISP -
What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person.
QUENTIN CRISP -
If you don’t stay in some days, you can’t recharge your batteries.
QUENTIN CRISP -
In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!
QUENTIN CRISP