No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
QUENTIN CRISPYou don’t have to deal with anyone in America. They accept you the way you are.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
-
-
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?
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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 -
Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
It’s a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to a drama school. And I said, “What did they teach you?” And she said, “They taught me to be a candle burning in an empty room.”
QUENTIN CRISP -
Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The flagrantly gay Quentin Crisp dealt with homophobic bullying by refusing to bow to its onslaught. His number listed in the phone directory, he responded to derogatory remarks accompanied with a stated intent to kill him by asking, “Would you like to make an appointment?”
QUENTIN CRISP -
Flowers are words even a baby can understand.
QUENTIN CRISP -
If I were God – and I never understand why I’m not – I should say, “Shop around, I don’t think you’ll find a better bargain than here.”
QUENTIN CRISP






