My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
QUENTIN CRISPMy mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
QUENTIN CRISPThe trouble with European cities is that they are drenched in their history, almost all of which is terrible.
QUENTIN CRISPYou can’t be a person and a lady. If you’re a person, you can open the damned door yourself.
QUENTIN CRISPThe war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
QUENTIN CRISPManners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.
QUENTIN CRISPIf 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 CRISPHe 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?
QUENTIN CRISPI 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.”
QUENTIN CRISPPeople 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 CRISPIs not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
QUENTIN CRISPOne should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.
QUENTIN CRISPWhat 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 CRISPWhen 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?’
QUENTIN CRISPThe more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches.
QUENTIN CRISPThere are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings.
QUENTIN CRISPIt may be true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance, but it’s also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts.
QUENTIN CRISP