I 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?
QUENTIN CRISPAssoon as I stepped out of my mother’s womb on to dry land, I realized that I had made a mistake?but the trouble with children is that they are not returnable.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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I don’t like peas, and I’m glad I don’t like them, because if I liked them I would eat them and I hate them.
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Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together,
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My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
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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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Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
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When asked, ‘Shall I tell my mother I’m gay?’, I reply, ‘Never tell your mother anything.
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Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.
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Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
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In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!
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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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Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret.
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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 have to realise that as I am only English and am allowed to live in America, I have to give something in return. And since I cannot build a hospital, or endow a university, I can only give my infinite availability.
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Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
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I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.
QUENTIN CRISP