The more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches.
QUENTIN CRISPFashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.
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The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call “the trouble with you.” Nevertheless, the journey is worth making.
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Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
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Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.
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I don’t really act. I say the words the way I would say them if I meant them.
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Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
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When I was young, we thought that Oscar Wilde was a great nobleman who had thrown his life away for love. Nothing could be less true. He slept with East Enders who were procured for him by Lord Alfred Douglas.
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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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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.
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In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!
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I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.
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A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.
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The trouble with children is that they’re not returnable.
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Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
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If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn.
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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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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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If you don’t stay in some days, you can’t recharge your batteries.
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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.
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There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.
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It’s a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.
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The measure of woman’s distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr’s crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.
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I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.
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It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.
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People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.
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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