Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.
QUENTIN CRISPI 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.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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Men get laid, but women get screwed.
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The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it
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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 -
Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.
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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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Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
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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.
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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?
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The flagrantly gay Quentin Crisp dealt with homophobic bullying by refusing to bow to its onslaught. His number listed in the phone directory, he responded to derogatory remarks accompanied with a stated intent to kill him by asking, “Would you like to make an appointment?”
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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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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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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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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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What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person.
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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’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.
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The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It’s not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it’s the resentment that settles on your face
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If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.
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There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings.
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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.
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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.
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The more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches.
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However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
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Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
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Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.
QUENTIN CRISP