Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically – for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist – but then what isn’t?
QUENTIN CRISPThe gymnasiacs of Venice, in California, are so addicted to these practices that there has arisen a nation of men who can no longer put their arms against their sides
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.
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My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
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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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I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.
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Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
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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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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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The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.
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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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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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You don’t have to deal with anyone in America. They accept you the way you are.
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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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However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
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Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbors.
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As we all know from witnessing the consuming jealousy of husbands who are never faithful, people do not confine themselves to the emotions to which they are entitled.
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