The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.
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.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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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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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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 war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
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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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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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You don’t have to deal with anyone in America. They accept you the way you are.
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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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To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
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However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
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Well, 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.
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Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
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My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
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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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It’s been agony but I couldn’t have done it any other way.
QUENTIN CRISP