Never get involved with someone who wants to change you
QUENTIN CRISPIn England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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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You don’t have to deal with anyone in America. They accept you the way you are.
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Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
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If I were God – and I never understand why I’m not – I should say, “Shop around, I don’t think you’ll find a better bargain than here.”
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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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When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?’
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One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.
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The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
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Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.
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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.
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If you truly love me, kill the bartender.
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Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
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The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It’s not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it’s the resentment that settles on your face
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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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What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person.
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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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In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
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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.
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I have to realise that as I am only English and am allowed to live in America, I have to give something in return. And since I cannot build a hospital, or endow a university, I can only give my infinite availability.
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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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No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
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Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
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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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In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
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I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to a drama school. And I said, “What did they teach you?” And she said, “They taught me to be a candle burning in an empty room.”
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When asked, ‘Shall I tell my mother I’m gay?’, I reply, ‘Never tell your mother anything.
QUENTIN CRISP