No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
QUENTIN CRISPI 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?’
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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 -
I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to a drama school. And I said, “What did they teach you?” And she said, “They taught me to be a candle burning in an empty room.”
QUENTIN CRISP -
Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
QUENTIN CRISP -
He knew them only ‘in Braille’ – the curtains were never drawn back in the rooms in Oxford where he met those boys. It was the most sordid life you can imagine. And he was bleating about love and dragging the fair name of Mr. Plato into the trial – after a life like that?
QUENTIN CRISP -
I have to realise that as I am only English and am allowed to live in America, I have to give something in return. And since I cannot build a hospital, or endow a university, I can only give my infinite availability.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbors.
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 -
If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I’m happy to say she was laughing while she said it, but she meant it. I’ve never learned to be a candle burning in an empty room. So I go on the screen, and I say whatever I’m told to say.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.
QUENTIN CRISP






