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 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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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!”
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 -
Vice is its own reward.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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 -
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 -
I never say ‘No’ to anything.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.
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Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate 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 -
If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.
QUENTIN CRISP -
No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
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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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And were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man’s soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.
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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.
QUENTIN CRISP