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.
QUENTIN CRISPI never saw Portsmouth by day.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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To lose is not always failure.
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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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People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.
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I never say ‘No’ to anything.
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If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.
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Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
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Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
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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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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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Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
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The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.
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For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
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Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): “What’s the matter, sexy? Don’t you like dehydrated fruit?
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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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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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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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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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It’s been agony but I couldn’t have done it any other way.
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Flowers are words even a baby can understand.
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Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.
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As we all know from witnessing the consuming jealousy of husbands who are never faithful, people do not confine themselves to the emotions to which they are entitled.
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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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If you truly love me, kill the bartender.
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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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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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Manners are love in a cool climate.
QUENTIN CRISP