A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.
QUENTIN CRISPWhen asked, ‘Shall I tell my mother I’m gay?’, I reply, ‘Never tell your mother anything.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.
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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 -
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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For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
QUENTIN CRISP -
To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
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Men get laid, but women get screwed.
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 -
I never spend my time doing anything I’ll have to do again tomorrow.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The trouble with children is that they’re not returnable.
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 -
Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
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.
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I never saw Portsmouth by day.
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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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To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
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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.
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The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
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Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically – for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist – but then what isn’t?
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Manners are love in a cool climate.
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Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.
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Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.
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You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
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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.
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If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.
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My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
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