I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do?
QUENTIN CRISPI like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
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I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.
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Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.
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Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.
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The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
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If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.
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To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
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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.
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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,
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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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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 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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Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
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The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.
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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:
QUENTIN CRISP






