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 CRISPBelieve in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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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Men get laid, but women get screwed.
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The 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
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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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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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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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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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In England, nobody’s your friend.
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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.
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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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I’m happy to say she was laughing while she said it, but she meant it. I’ve never learned to be a candle burning in an empty room. So I go on the screen, and I say whatever I’m told to say.
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The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
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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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Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
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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