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!”
QUENTIN CRISPThe very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.
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Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
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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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The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as ‘Soho’ poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.
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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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
QUENTIN CRISP -
If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.
QUENTIN CRISP -
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
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Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?
QUENTIN CRISP -
You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Happiness is the only thing I understand.
QUENTIN CRISP -
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
QUENTIN CRISP -
It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.
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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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I recommend limiting one’s involvement in other people’s lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.
QUENTIN CRISP






