In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
Quentin Crisp | 
Quentin Crisp at Amazon
2
0
I have always lived my life in the profession of being.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
1 0
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.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
A pinch of notoriety will do.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
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.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
I am not famous; I am notorious and if I am rich it is because I have taken my wages in people.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
I am one of the stately homos of old England.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
I told Mr. Hurt it was difficult for actors to play victims, but he has specialized in victims. When he stopped playing me, he played Caligula, which was only me in a sheet. Then he played The Elephant Man, which was only me with a paper bag over my head.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
If I were asked to describe the difference between the sexes in the gay world, I would say that the men wanted to be amused; the girls sought vindication.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
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 | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
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 | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation to which the filing system has been lost?
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
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 Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
It's no good running a pig farm badly for thirty years while saying, Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer. By then, pigs will be your style.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Life is a game in which the rules are constantly changing; nothing spoils a game more than those who take it seriously. Adultery? Phooey! You should never subjugate yourself to another nor seek the subjugation of someone else to yourself. If you follow that Crispian principle you will be able to say Phooey, too, instead of reaching for your gun when you fancy yourself betrayed.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Life was a funny thing that occurred on the way to the grave.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Los Angeles is just New York lying down.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone- but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
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 | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Manners are love in a cool climate.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Marriage is but for a little while. It is alimony that is forever.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Men get laid, but women get screwed.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Mr. Crisp thanks the world for letting him stay so long.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
My function in life was to render clear what was already blindingly conspicuous.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Never get involved with someone who wants to change you.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
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 | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
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 | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
The continued propinquity of another human being cramps the style after a time unless that person is somebody you think you love. Then the burden becomes intolerable at once.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as Soho poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
The trouble with children is that they are not returnable.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
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 | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
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 | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
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 | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
This school was on top of a hill so that God could see everything that went on. It looked like a cross between a prison and a church and it was.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
When asked, Should I tell my mother I'm gay? I answer, Never tell your mother anything.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
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 | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
Quentin Crisp | Quentin Crisp at Amazon
0 0
Daily Doses of English
Lorenzo Silva - 19/5/2013
Jacek Le?niewicz - 23/5/2013
Tania Kandra - 16/4/2013
