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.
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
-
-
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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 -
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,
QUENTIN CRISP -
In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!
QUENTIN CRISP -
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 CRISP -
If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Flowers are words even a baby can understand.
QUENTIN CRISP -
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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 -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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?’
QUENTIN CRISP -
I’ve never not been famous.
QUENTIN CRISP -
However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
QUENTIN CRISP -
If you don’t stay in some days, you can’t recharge your batteries.
QUENTIN CRISP