I never say ‘No’ to anything.
QUENTIN CRISPThe flagrantly gay Quentin Crisp dealt with homophobic bullying by refusing to bow to its onslaught. His number listed in the phone directory, he responded to derogatory remarks accompanied with a stated intent to kill him by asking, “Would you like to make an appointment?”
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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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In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
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Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
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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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To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
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I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!
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You will survive if you believe in yourself.
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I’ve never not been famous.
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You don’t have to deal with anyone in America. They accept you the way you are.
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Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can’t help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. And they don’t like that. That’s the famous joke:
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Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.
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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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Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret.
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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.
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If I were God – and I never understand why I’m not – I should say, “Shop around, I don’t think you’ll find a better bargain than here.”
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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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Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.
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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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No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
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The trouble with European cities is that they are drenched in their history, almost all of which is terrible.
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The measure of woman’s distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr’s crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.
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The trouble with children is that they’re not returnable.
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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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The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It’s not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it’s the resentment that settles on your face
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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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An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
QUENTIN CRISP