The trouble with children is that they’re not returnable.
QUENTIN CRISPI don’t like peas, and I’m glad I don’t like them, because if I liked them I would eat them and I hate them.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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Flowers are words even a baby can understand.
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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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If you truly love me, kill the bartender.
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I never spend my time doing anything I’ll have to do again tomorrow.
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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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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 world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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I don’t think you can really be proud of being gay because it isn’t something you’ve done. You can only be proud of not being ashamed.
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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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The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
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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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When asked, ‘Shall I tell my mother I’m gay?’, I reply, ‘Never tell your mother anything.
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It’s been agony but I couldn’t have done it any other way.
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The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.
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To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
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Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.
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I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!
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While I have very little to say in favor of sex (it’s vastly overrated, it’s frequently unnecessary, and it’s messy), it is greatly to be preferred to the interminable torments of romantic agony through which two people tear one another limb from limb while professing altruistic devotion.
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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.
QUENTIN CRISP