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.
QUENTIN CRISPTo love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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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Men get laid, but women get screwed.
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The … problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a “real” man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who “goes with” other men is not what they would call a real man. The conundrum is incapable of resolution, but that does not make homosexuals give it up.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as ‘Soho’ poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.
QUENTIN CRISP -
When asked, ‘Shall I tell my mother I’m gay?’, I reply, ‘Never tell your mother anything.
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Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?
QUENTIN CRISP -
It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.
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It’s been agony but I couldn’t have done it any other way.
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People say to me, “When did you come out?” But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I’d found in an attic, saying, “I am a beautiful princess!”
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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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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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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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Abatement in the hostility of one’s enemies must never be thought to signify they have been won over. It only means that one has ceased to constitute a threat.
QUENTIN CRISP