An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
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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Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.
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If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.
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Men get laid, but women get screwed.
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I never saw Portsmouth by day.
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You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
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Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.
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I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.
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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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I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.
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Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.
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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.
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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.
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If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.
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And were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man’s soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.
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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






