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.
QUENTIN CRISPI take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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.
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 -
I’ve never not been famous.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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?
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 -
Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.
QUENTIN CRISP -
In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
QUENTIN CRISP -
No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
QUENTIN CRISP -
What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I never spend my time doing anything I’ll have to do again tomorrow.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The … problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a “real” man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who “goes with” other men is not what they would call a real man. The conundrum is incapable of resolution, but that does not make homosexuals give it up.
QUENTIN CRISP -
If I were God – and I never understand why I’m not – I should say, “Shop around, I don’t think you’ll find a better bargain than here.”
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






