People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.
QUENTIN CRISPThe 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
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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There 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.
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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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Never get involved with someone who wants to change you
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If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.
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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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Happiness is the only thing I understand.
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Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
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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 fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
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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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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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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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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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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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The more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches.
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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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Vice is its own reward.
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In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!
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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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Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
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When asked, ‘Shall I tell my mother I’m gay?’, I reply, ‘Never tell your mother anything.
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You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.
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I’ve never not been famous.
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I don’t really act. I say the words the way I would say them if I meant them.
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Manners are love in a cool climate.
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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.
QUENTIN CRISP