In England, nobody’s your friend.
QUENTIN CRISPThe 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.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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To lose is not always failure.
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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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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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You don’t have to deal with anyone in America. They accept you the way you are.
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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 young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
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Men get laid, but women get screwed.
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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.
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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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When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?’
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Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can’t help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. And they don’t like that. That’s the famous joke:
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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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To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
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I don’t think you can really be proud of being gay because it isn’t something you’ve done. You can only be proud of not being ashamed.
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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 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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Never get involved with someone who wants to change you
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I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.
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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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You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.
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I’ve never not been famous.
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The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
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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.
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The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It’s not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it’s the resentment that settles on your face
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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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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