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 CRISPIf I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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In England, nobody’s your friend.
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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?
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Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
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To live in the past is to miss today’s opportunities and tomorrow’s blessings.
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The trouble with European cities is that they are drenched in their history, almost all of which is terrible.
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What my parents thought of this, I don’t know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.
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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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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.
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Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbors.
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It’s been agony but I couldn’t have done it any other way.
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Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret.
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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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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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To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
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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






