It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.
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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I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
QUENTIN CRISP -
You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The trouble with children is that they’re not returnable.
QUENTIN CRISP -
If you don’t stay in some days, you can’t recharge your batteries.
QUENTIN CRISP -
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?’
QUENTIN CRISP -
When asked, ‘Shall I tell my mother I’m gay?’, I reply, ‘Never tell your mother anything.
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 -
Never get involved with someone who wants to change you
QUENTIN CRISP -
Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.
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 -
Flowers are words even a baby can understand.
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 never say ‘No’ to anything.
QUENTIN CRISP -
People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbors.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It’s not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it’s the resentment that settles on your face
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 -
The measure of woman’s distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr’s crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
QUENTIN CRISP -
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it
QUENTIN CRISP