The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.
QUENTIN CRISPThere is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
-
-
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can’t help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. And they don’t like that. That’s the famous joke:
QUENTIN CRISP -
You will survive if you believe in yourself.
QUENTIN CRISP -
If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.
QUENTIN CRISP -
In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!
QUENTIN CRISP -
Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
QUENTIN CRISP -
If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I don’t really act. I say the words the way I would say them if I meant them.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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 -
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 CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP