The trouble with European cities is that they are drenched in their history, almost all of which is terrible.
QUENTIN CRISPIt’s been agony but I couldn’t have done it any other way.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
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Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
QUENTIN CRISP -
When asked, ‘Shall I tell my mother I’m gay?’, I reply, ‘Never tell your mother anything.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I 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.”
QUENTIN CRISP -
Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
QUENTIN CRISP -
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I had a friend who had two degrees of being made up: when invited I would say ‘Can I make up?’ and he would say ‘Oh yes – tinted?’, or he would say, ‘Oh yes – clotted?’
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 -
If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
QUENTIN CRISP -
If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn.
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 trouble with children is that they’re not returnable.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.
QUENTIN CRISP -
In England, nobody’s your friend.
QUENTIN CRISP -
It’s a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.
QUENTIN CRISP -
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?
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 -
Manners are love in a cool climate.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Flowers are words even a baby can understand.
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 -
I have to realise that as I am only English and am allowed to live in America, I have to give something in return. And since I cannot build a hospital, or endow a university, I can only give my infinite availability.
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 -
Happiness is the only thing I understand.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
QUENTIN CRISP -
To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
QUENTIN CRISP