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.
QUENTIN CRISPOf 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?
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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It’s been agony but I couldn’t have done it any other way.
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Vice is its own reward.
QUENTIN CRISP -
If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn.
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In England, nobody’s your friend.
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Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
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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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I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.
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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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People 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!”
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I never saw Portsmouth by day.
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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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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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The trouble with children is that they’re not returnable.
QUENTIN CRISP -
You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.
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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.
QUENTIN CRISP