Quentin Crisp quotes

Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbours. (Quentin Crisp)
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.
Quentin Crisp
Life was a funny thing that occurred on the way to the grave.
Quentin Crisp
Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
Quentin Crisp
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
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
There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.
Quentin Crisp
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
Quentin Crisp
There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.
Quentin Crisp
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
Quentin Crisp
If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style. (Quentin Crisp)
This woman did not fly to extremes she lived there.
Quentin Crisp
If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.
Quentin Crisp
However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
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
Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.
Quentin Crisp
I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.
Quentin Crisp
Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
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
The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
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. (Quentin Crisp)
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
Quentin Crisp
All liaisons between homosexuals are conducted as though they were between a chorus girl and a bishop. In some cases both parties think they are bishops.
Quentin Crisp
I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east.
Quentin Crisp
I became one of the stately homos of England.
Quentin Crisp