The trouble with European cities is that they are drenched in their history, almost all of which is terrible.
QUENTIN CRISPBecause 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,
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
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 -
The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Women have decided to be people, which is a great mistake. Women were nicer than people.
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 -
Happiness is the only thing I understand.
QUENTIN CRISP -
As we all know from witnessing the consuming jealousy of husbands who are never faithful, people do not confine themselves to the emotions to which they are entitled.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
QUENTIN CRISP -
You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
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 -
Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.
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