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.
QUENTIN CRISPWhen 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.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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The measure of woman’s distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr’s crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do?
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
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 -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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 -
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.
QUENTIN CRISP