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 CRISPLove 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.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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?”
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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.
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An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
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Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together,
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Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
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You can’t be a person and a lady. If you’re a person, you can open the damned door yourself.
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To live in the past is to miss today’s opportunities and tomorrow’s blessings.
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The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
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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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I never saw Portsmouth by day.
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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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Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically – for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist – but then what isn’t?
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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.
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The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.
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I never say ‘No’ to anything.
QUENTIN CRISP