Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.
QUENTIN CRISPIf 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.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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.
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The gymnasiacs of Venice, in California, are so addicted to these practices that there has arisen a nation of men who can no longer put their arms against their sides
QUENTIN CRISP -
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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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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You can’t be a person and a lady. If you’re a person, you can open the damned door yourself.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
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 -
The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
QUENTIN CRISP -
To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
QUENTIN CRISP -
You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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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Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.”
QUENTIN CRISP -
I never spend my time doing anything I’ll have to do again tomorrow.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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
QUENTIN CRISP -
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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!
QUENTIN CRISP -
Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.
QUENTIN CRISP -
It’s been agony but I couldn’t have done it any other way.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Flowers are words even a baby can understand.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I never saw Portsmouth by day.
QUENTIN CRISP