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.
QUENTIN CRISPThere 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.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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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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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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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Manners are love in a cool climate.
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The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.
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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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Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
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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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In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
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An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
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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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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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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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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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To live in the past is to miss today’s opportunities and tomorrow’s blessings.
QUENTIN CRISP






