I don’t think you can really be proud of being gay because it isn’t something you’ve done. You can only be proud of not being ashamed.
QUENTIN CRISPWell, 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.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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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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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 -
Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
QUENTIN CRISP -
To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
To live in the past is to miss today’s opportunities and tomorrow’s blessings.
QUENTIN CRISP -
In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
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 -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Never get involved with someone who wants to change you
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 -
It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.
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He knew them only ‘in Braille’ – the curtains were never drawn back in the rooms in Oxford where he met those boys. It was the most sordid life you can imagine. And he was bleating about love and dragging the fair name of Mr. Plato into the trial – after a life like that?
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Vice is its own reward.
QUENTIN CRISP






