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.
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?’
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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.
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Flowers are words even a baby can understand.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Manners are love in a cool climate.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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 -
No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
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The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I never saw Portsmouth by day.
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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.
QUENTIN CRISP






