The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.
QUENTIN CRISPI went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do?
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.
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I never saw Portsmouth by day.
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The trouble with children is that they’re not returnable.
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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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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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The measure of woman’s distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr’s crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.
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Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.
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I’m happy to say she was laughing while she said it, but she meant it. I’ve never learned to be a candle burning in an empty room. So I go on the screen, and I say whatever I’m told to say.
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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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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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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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I never say ‘No’ to anything.
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Flowers are words even a baby can understand.
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Manners are love in a cool climate.
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Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.
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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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I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.
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If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.
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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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I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.
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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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I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!
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Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
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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.
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Vice is its own reward.
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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.
QUENTIN CRISP