Never get involved with someone who wants to change you
QUENTIN CRISPNothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.
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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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If you truly love me, kill the bartender.
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The more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches.
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I recommend limiting one’s involvement in other people’s lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.
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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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I don’t like peas, and I’m glad I don’t like them, because if I liked them I would eat them and I hate them.
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To lose is not always failure.
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I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do?
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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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In England, nobody’s your friend.
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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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Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.
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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 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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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?
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The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.
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Happiness is the only thing I understand.
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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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In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
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Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): “What’s the matter, sexy? Don’t you like dehydrated fruit?
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I had a friend who had two degrees of being made up: when invited I would say ‘Can I make up?’ and he would say ‘Oh yes – tinted?’, or he would say, ‘Oh yes – clotted?’
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Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.
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If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.
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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