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.
QUENTIN CRISPMainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can’t help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. And they don’t like that. That’s the famous joke:
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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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The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as ‘Soho’ poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.
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The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call “the trouble with you.” Nevertheless, the journey is worth making.
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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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Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.
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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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Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?
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Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.
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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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It’s a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.
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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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Vice is its own reward.
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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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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.
QUENTIN CRISP