Best 101 quotes of Quentin S. Crisp on MyQuotes

1977 was also, of course, the year that Derek Jarman made his iconoclastic film Jubilee, which was so much part of the punk movement.

Another part of the rejection I mention was the realisation that Buddhism quite simply ignores or dismisses a whole hemisphere of human experience that finds expression in and is enshrined by the mystery religions.

[Antinatalism ] seems to oppose the idea of writing anything at all. To reproduce is to pass on genes. To write is to pass on memes. In that sense, it really is a kind of reproduction, which antinatalism should, theoretically, oppose, or at least which I feel that it opposes emotionally in my own experience.

Anyway, to cut off one's biological dreams seems to me the most fundamental form of psychic castration that you could imagine.

Anyway, yes, telephones but not mobile phones, fish and chips still wrapped in actual newspaper and still with some kind of flavour, people visiting each other without having to consult their appointment diaries, not being able to record anything from the television; if you missed it you missed it - these were all the kinds of thing that made up the normality of the seventies.

Apart from the underlying mystery of all things, there is also another possible specific mystery in this situation: Why did I become so interested in Buddhism, Zen and so on? I seem to have a Buddhist voice in my head, and someone asked me about this recently, saying he was intrigued.

As children in the seventies we were told about nebulous 'strangers'. By definition, we didn't know who these strangers were, and we didn't know what they wanted to do, but only that they were sinister. I think that was the stage the seventies were at.

I also remember a line from a song by Smog [Bill Callahan], which seems to describe the experience of a town-dweller moving to the country: "I was raised in a pit of snakes/Blink your eyes - I was raised on cake.

I associate my childhood with two things, mainly: the North Devon countryside and a sense of connection to another world.

I began researching and writing what I intended as a book-length essay entitled Fascination and Liberation, exploring the question of whether there is a conflict between creativity and the Eastern form of enlightenment. I don't know if I'll ever finish that essay, because I had an experience, after I'd written two or three chapters, in which it seemed to me that my psychic antibodies decisively rejected Buddhism. Interestingly, the rejection felt as if it happened in Zen terms.

I can't imagine anyone ever again being able to make a film like, say, Summer Holiday, for instance, to give a British example, actually. And there will never be another Annette Funicello. I suppose it's the slight starchiness of the innocence that makes it unrepeatable.

I did not understand the differences between Catholic and Protestant until I was an adult.

I do have a muse. I am not sure how to describe her. She can be very elusive. She was born in England but has Mediterranean ancestry.

I do not think that my spiritual apprehensions are as dogmatically cultural as those of many people who have been brought up strictly in a particular tradition.

I don't believe in sexual love.

I don't know if Britain ever really achieved that much glamour. We had post-war austerity rather than post-war prosperity, and our cultural products of the time include some pretty dour kitchen-sink dramas of the A Kind of Loving variety. (This kind of film seems disillusioned with the sixties before they've even really begun.)

I don't want to give too much away, but something horrible happens in 1977. That was also the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee. I remember this jubilee. I remember receiving a commemorative coin from the school. I think it was a fifty pence piece. That was its monetary value, but it was not a normal fifty pence piece, and it would have been strange to try and use it in a shop.

I feel a little as if the Buddhism is creeping back, but I mention all this simply in order to illustrate that there is, in my life, a fundamental sense of conflict between something that I am calling 'Buddhism' and my creative impulse.

I feel almost as if I had been born in a vacuum of innocence, and then had to come to terms with the fact that actually, I was born into the middle of history - the rather grimy normality of the 70s, which did, indeed, retain some traces of human innocence, but were also girded about by the demons of experience.

I feel like the seventies was a decade where things ran out, and where other things set in. There was just a lurking graininess and seediness about the decade, a slight grogginess of the hangover from the sixties.

I feel that Nagai Kafu was a writer who cold stitch together apparently meaningless moments like these into a lyrical whole, and has enhanced my ability to do the same with my own life.

If future history is not to be just one damned thing after another in space, then what we really have to do is in some way overcome this linear experience of time that makes all existence a quest for something that will never be found.And philosophies such as Zen seem to hint that this is possible.

If there is innocence on Earth again, I tend to imagine it in more [Henry David]Thoreau sort of terms.

If we do overcome linear time, I would hope this means dwelling more directly in the fertility of the imagination rather than denying it, as some aspects of Buddhism seem to.

If we do want to do that [ colonise space to survive, ], then vacuous materialism is not going to be enough for us.

If you look at the ox-herding pictures - specifically the newer set of ten pictures rather than the older set of eight - you see that after the blank circle of the void, the cycle comes back to a river flowing by the roots of a tree (both strong symbols of nature, the life-force, the unconscious) and to the wanderer returning to the market place, which is the realm of human society and activity.

I grew up in North Devon, by the sea, and feel a special affinity for the landscape there, despite a lack of actual ancestry.

I grew up with tarot cards and the reading of tea leaves.

I have a bit of a struggle with some aspects of or forms of Buddhism, but Zen I find to be mainly congenial.

I have a sense of them being Easter religions, for some reason. Christianity, of course, is a mystery religion, too, and I believe that Arthur Machen was one of those especially interested in the link between the pagan mysteries and the Christian ones. So, my experience was also a Machenesque experience.

I like the concept of an anti-muse, though I'm not quite sure what that is. If there is such a thing in my life, I suppose it is just this weariness, this sense that it is more fulfilling not to exist, to efface all traces, than to limit oneself to the determined expression of manifestation.

I'm constantly struggling with the futility and even sinfulness, from an antinatalist point of view, of creativity. And that struggle itself seems part of the creativity, though I sometimes suspect that it's nothing but a burden and an obstacle.

I mean, in 1979 I was seven. I do remember punk, though, as a playground phenomenon, and remember that it was exciting to us. It really was, to a five- or six-year-old, quite a thrilling enticement to revolt. The anarchy sign scratched in desk tops, and so on.

I'm more a dog person than a cat person.

I'm not claiming anything like sainthood - merely a native perception.

I'm not sure if there is a cultural loss of innocence specifically associated with the seventies. The oil crisis? The Watergate scandal? I really don't know. There's nothing there on the scale of Hiroshima.

I never seem to find what I'm looking for, though. I suppose I feel, these days, too aware of schedules and things, to let myself get lost in the rain. Anyway, I came back home, and it was still raining, and as I was approaching the driveway of the house, and the front garden with its bushy flower bed, I caught a cooking smell from somewhere on the air. I don't know why, exactly, but it appealed to me as a Nagai Kafu moment.

In terms of what is expressed, antinatalism is a strong presence, not always explicit, in what I write.

In the meditation, of course, the question is repeated and repeated until you run out of answers - or so I hear.

I really think [William] Burroughs was onto something here, when he said, "Dreams are a biologic necessity and your lifeline into space.

I seemed to recall some words from an old Zen master, something like, "My Zen cuts down mountains." My rejection of Buddhism was a cutting down of mountains; that is precisely how it felt to me.

I seem to be less depressed but also less hopeful now in my thirties. My widow's peak bothers me. I think a lot about the end of the human race. And so on.

I suppose I could say that to be interested in innocence already suggests a remove from innocence, perhaps a longing for something that is lost.

I suppose what I can say is that I do feel I have a natural spiritual sensibility.

I think [imagination] very austere element of Buddhism is also linked with a strong antinatalist strain in the philosophy. The Buddha was enlightened when he destroyed the house of body and soul into which he would otherwise have been forever reborn. This is clearly antinatalism.

I think I'm probably too close to the seventies to be able to analyse them (it?) effectively.

I think I still have [commemorative coin ] somewhere. Why was this given to me? I think every child in the country must have received one [ from Queen's Silver Jubilee]. That's the last time that I recall something of an innocent, more-or-less unquestioning monarchist patriotism in Britain.

I think the natural is, for many people, the gateway to something supernatural or otherworldly.

I think there's a good case for antinatalism. Stephen Hawking has told us recently that we must colonise space to survive, not long after telling us to beware of aliens because they'll probably just do to us as the conquistadors did to the native peoples of the Americas. So . . . exactly why do we want to go on and on, to go forth and multiply in a hostile final frontier? Why?

I think the seventies caught the last red rays of the dying sun of this innocence, but were already a little cold and drab.