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 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.”
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbors.
QUENTIN CRISP -
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Manners are love in a cool climate.
QUENTIN CRISP -
No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
QUENTIN CRISP -
When I was young, we thought that Oscar Wilde was a great nobleman who had thrown his life away for love. Nothing could be less true. He slept with East Enders who were procured for him by Lord Alfred Douglas.
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 -
Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I never saw Portsmouth by day.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
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Happiness is the only thing I understand.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.
QUENTIN CRISP