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?
QUENTIN CRISPIn Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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Manners are love in a cool climate.
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Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
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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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People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.
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You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
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You will survive if you believe in yourself.
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Women have decided to be people, which is a great mistake. Women were nicer than people.
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Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
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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 take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.
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Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.
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I never saw Portsmouth by day.
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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.
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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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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.
QUENTIN CRISP