Manners are love in a cool climate.
QUENTIN CRISPManners are love in a cool climate.
QUENTIN CRISPAn autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
QUENTIN CRISPThough intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
QUENTIN CRISPSex is the last refuge of the miserable.
QUENTIN CRISPWhen I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?’
QUENTIN CRISPYou can’t be a person and a lady. If you’re a person, you can open the damned door yourself.
QUENTIN CRISPKeeping 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 CRISPEuphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
QUENTIN CRISPIn an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
QUENTIN CRISPWell, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.
QUENTIN CRISPNeither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret.
QUENTIN CRISPAnd 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.
QUENTIN CRISPMasturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who…have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies.
QUENTIN CRISPIf 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.
QUENTIN CRISPAssoon as I stepped out of my mother’s womb on to dry land, I realized that I had made a mistake?but the trouble with children is that they are not returnable.
QUENTIN CRISPThe English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.
QUENTIN CRISP