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?
QUENTIN CRISPI 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.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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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If you truly love me, kill the bartender.
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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.
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However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
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Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
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People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.
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Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.
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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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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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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.
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I have to realise that as I am only English and am allowed to live in America, I have to give something in return. And since I cannot build a hospital, or endow a university, I can only give my infinite availability.
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If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.
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Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbors.
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I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do?
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Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.
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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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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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I never say ‘No’ to anything.
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To live in the past is to miss today’s opportunities and tomorrow’s blessings.
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It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.
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Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
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My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
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When 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?’
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Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
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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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Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
QUENTIN CRISP