Best 197 quotes of Quentin Crisp on MyQuotes

Abatement in the hostility of one's enemies must never be thought to signify they have been won over. It only means that one has ceased to constitute a threat.

A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.

A gentleman doesn't pounce he glides. If a woman sits on a piece of furniture which permits your sitting beside her, you are free to regard this as an invitation, though not an unequivocal one.

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.

All this cut-price transcendentalism does not prevent California from being a startlingly physical state. This becomes most obvious where Los Angeles saunters down to the sea. The region is called Venice.

America believes in freedom. The English don't believe in it. They don't believe in happiness.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

Any film is at least better than real life.

Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he..." This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him.

As a test of the closeness of your relationship with the world, sex could never be a patch on being murdered. (That's when someone really does risk his life for you.)

As far as I know, you can fancy someone, you can enjoy their company or you can wish them well. But what being in love is, I don't know.

As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, "they can't leave anything alone.

As soon as a person takes a part as a homosexual, the press says, "What do your wife and children think of this?" And the actor never says, "Well, last week I was a murderer, and the week before that I was a child molester, and the week before that I was a lunatic. But now I'm a homosexual.

Assoon as I stepped out of my mother's womb on to dry land, I realized that I had made a mistake?but the trouble with children is that they are not returnable.

As we all know from witnessing the consuming jealousy of husbands who are never faithful, people do not confine themselves to the emotions to which they are entitled.

Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality.

Britain cherishes her eccentrics and wisely holds that the function of government is to build a walled garden in which anarchy can flourish.

Central Europe is full of little countries standing shoulder to shoulder with no window to the sea. They are like the passengers in a rush-hour train which has stopped between stations for three centuries. And they all hate one another. And they're all crushed together waving their national flags, clanking their national chains, jabbering their national language.

Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

Did you know that Allah promises you a seat in Paradise if you kill a Christian?

England is very dreary, but I'm a people person.

Euphemisms are not, as many young people think, useless verbiage for that which can and should be said bluntly; they are like secret agents on a delicate mission, they must airily pass by a stinking mess with barely so much as a nod of the head, make their point of constructive criticism and continue on in calm forbearance. Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

Everybody who's been on television more than once wears in public an expression of fatuous affability. Because you may be addressed at any moment by somebody.

Every day someone notices me and waves to me, or stops and speaks to me, or asks me for an autograph, or photographs me.

Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.

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. If you have no personality, you may be able to save your face and, possibly, your entire anatomy by following the current fashion, but all we shall know about you, when we see you coming down the street, is that you had enough money to buy a glossy magazine and were sufficiently cunning to work out the cut of the garments shown therein.

Fear and hatred do not seem to find expression in tears.

For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.

For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.

Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.

However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.

I approach my life with logic. I do not act on impulse or emotion. I very seldom find that I say, 'And then I can't think what came over me, but I did this or that or the other.' I nearly always know how I will act and I nearly always act in that way. I don't catch myself out in embarrassing situations because I've acted without forethought. I calculate what I will do.

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." 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.

I came first to America in 1977 at the invitation of a man who wanted to make my life story into a musical. But my agent said it was not to be and it was never done. So I went back, but I'd seen New York, and I wanted to live there. Because everybody talks to you in the street. See, nobody talks to you in England.

I can't remember ever having a tragic demeanor. Although my life was tragedy.

I don't believe in convention at all. I do what I have to do to stay alive.

I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.

I don't know how people act. I've never understood that.

I don't think I have a tragic demeanor.

I don't think you can really be proud of being gay because it isn't something you've done. You can only be proud of not being ashamed.

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, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.

If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.

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.

If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.

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.