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.
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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I never spend my time doing anything I’ll have to do again tomorrow.
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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?’
QUENTIN CRISP -
There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.
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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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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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
If you truly love me, kill the bartender.
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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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However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
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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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You will survive if you believe in 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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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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No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
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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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People say to me, “When did you come out?” But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I’d found in an attic, saying, “I am a beautiful princess!”
QUENTIN CRISP