“Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.”

If you don’t stay in some days, you can’t recharge your batteries.

It may be true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance, but it’s also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who…have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies.

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.

Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): “What’s the matter, sexy? Don’t you like dehydrated fruit?

In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.

Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

I never say ‘No’ to anything.

Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?

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.

And our knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest ignorance to those who come after us. Yet it is not to be despised, since by it we reach up groping to touch the hem of the garment of the Most High.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn’t have anything to do with me, but it’s just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

There appears to be momentum towards more and more misunderstandings between religions, a degradation of relations.

In which (or where) everyone is mainly (or mostly) trying to assert oneself in front of others (“devant les autres”, Fr.), to appear, and hoping to find in society (“mondaine”, Fr.) relationships some advantages for his interest and vanity (or vainglory or conceit”, Fr).

The brute appears (or come forward, “apparait”, Fr.) and rule over (or dominate), stifling every (“toute”, Fr.) noble, generous impulse; it is then the ruin (or downfall or decline) of any humanity in man.

It would appear… that moral phenomena, when observed on a great scale, are found to resemble physical phenomena; and we thus arrive.

The NRA appears to have evolved into the lobby for gun and ammunition manufacturers rather than gun owners.

The law courts must appear as a threatening gesture toward secret vice.