Quentin Crisp Quotes

I stay in one room, and it's easier to live there, to control it, to make it warm. It seems to me a convenient way to live, and it's cheap.

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.

I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.

Happiness is the only thing I understand.

Europeans have quarrelled since the beginning of time.

The ... problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a "real" man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who "goes with" other men is not what they would call a real man. The conundrum is incapable of resolution, but that does not make homosexuals give it up.

The gymnasiacs of Venice, in California, are so addicted to these practices that there has arisen a nation of men who can no longer put their arms against their sides

I am the last of Britain's stately homos.

The United States are a miracle: the division between two states is sometimes a river or a mountain, and sometimes it's a straight line. But nobody says, "That tree really belongs in South Carolina. I shan't do anything about it now, I'll get it back later." I shall go after I am here to London and after that to Potsdam, where Comrade Stalin, Mr Churchill and Harry Truman divided up Europe; and what we see now is the result of that. The Americans would have accepted it. But Europeans don't accept anything.

Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.

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.

People say to me, "When did you come out?" But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I'd found in an attic, saying, "I am a beautiful princess!" What my parents thought of this, I don't know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.

Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.

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.

Exhibitionists have no friends, no friends at all.

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.

The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

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.

I have known female whores who spoke very bitterly of their calling. "If they don't like my face, they can put a cushion over it. I know it's not that they're interested in." But to the boys this profession never seemed shameful. It was their daytime occupations for which they felt the need to apologize. In some instances, these were lower class or humdrum or, worst of all, unfeminine. At least whoring was never that.

Nearly always when actors are approached by the beauticians, they try to avoid the dabs that the beauticians put on their faces. They dodge them.

I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.

I'm too old to make drawings.

The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call “the trouble with you.” Nevertheless, the journey is worth making.

I never spend my time doing anything I'll have to do again tomorrow.

Never get involved with someone who wants to change you

To minimize my guilt at going to the pictures - to call this wanton pursuit of an effete pleasure by another name - I needed movie companions as drunkards need drinking partners. If I entered a cinema alone, God might plunge his arm through the roof of the auditorium booming in a stereophonic voice, 'And you, Crisp, what are you doing here?' I would never have dared reply, 'I'm just enjoying myself, Lord.'

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.

I lost the love of all the homosexuals in the world by saying that Princess Diana was trash and got what she deserved. She could have been Queen of England - and she was swanning about Paris with Arabs. What disgraceful behavior. Going about saying she wanted to be the queen of hearts. The vulgarity of it is so overpowering.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.

You can behave as badly as you like in America. Nobody notices.

I've always lived in the same way.

Women have decided to be people, which is a great mistake. Women were nicer than people.

In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.

Now you can leave home at any time you like.Your mother comes down and finds a picture of the Eiffel Tower on her plate. And she says, 'Oh! Rosemary's gone to Paris. No wonder the bathroom was so tidy.' And nobody minds. But in my day, to go abroad with all those wicked Frenchmen, what would become of them? So no-one ever went anywhere.

You don't have to do anything.

If you live in America, you don't have to work. You can just drift along in the smiling and nodding racket.

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

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

Vienna is cold, and dark, and sad. It is laid out as though for a royal parade; the streets are wide and they're flanked by monumental buildings, decorated with the faces of angry gods. And on the roof are statues of national heroes, wielding weapons of destruction.

Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.

I was beaten up wherever I went, and people shouted at me and cursed me and threw things at me.

Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): "What's the matter, sexy? Don't you like dehydrated fruit?

What better proof of love can there be than money? A ten-shilling note shows incontrovertibly just how mad about you a man is.

The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It's not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it's the resentment that settles on your face

The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.

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.

I would never go to a place and live there because the weather was good or the scenery was beautiful or the architecture was wonderful. I would only go because the people are kind, and in America, everybody's your friend and happiness rains down from the sky.