Quentin Crisp Quotes

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

Vice is its own reward.

It may be true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance, but it's also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts.

That's the only sense in which I've been lucky: I have the kind of face to which cosmetics could be applied.

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

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

The message that 'love' will solve all of our problems is repeated incessantly in contemporary culture - like a philosophical tom tom. It would be closer to the truth to say that love is a contagious and virulent disease which leaves a victim in a state of near imbecility, paralysis, profound melancholia, and sometimes culminates in death.

To live in the past is to miss today's opportunities and tomorrow's blessings.

I now realize that education is a last wild effort on the part of the authorities to prevent an overdose of leisure from driving the world mad. Learning is no longer an improver; it is merely the most expensive time-filler the world has ever known.

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

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.

In Manhattan, when you're out of the front door, you're on, and you have to be ready to smile and speak to people.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

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

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

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?

All America is much the same.

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.

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

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.

In most cases an act of unwelcome sex is no more bother than being vaccinated, so there's no point going on about it as if it werea fate worse than death. With skill and good manners you can avoid having to make the sacrifice, but should you find yourself in a compromising situation largely of your own making, you should stop defending your virtue and start worrying about your maturity. It will give you something to think about while the savage pumper bangs away.

I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.

When I was young, I don't know how, I spent all my time in the presence of married women telling me their troubles. And when I said 'Why did you marry?' they said, 'Oh I married to get away from home.' And when I said, 'And why don't you leave him?' they gave the saddest answer in the world: they said, 'Where would I go?' So they stayed with men they didn't like because they had nowhere to go.

The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it

Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.

When I was young, I wanted to find the Great Dark Man. When I said that I realise now that people thought that by 'dark' I meant black, and that by 'great' I meant big. Whereas I only meant a strong, mysterious person; someone who would 'take me away from all this.'

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there.

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.

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

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.

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.

I don't really act. I say the words the way I would say them if I meant them.

It's written into the Constitution that you're allowed to pursue happiness. In England it would be considered a frivolous objective.

I am asked how to remain young, and I say 'Never, never work.' And that, of course, is the secret of it.

The trouble with European cities is that they are drenched in their history, almost all of which is terrible.

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.

Any film is at least better than real life.

Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.

When asked to give advice, I do of course give it, because I give whatever I am asked to give.

To lose is not always failure.

I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.

When I was young, we thought that Oscar Wilde was a great nobleman who had thrown his life away for love. Nothing could be less true. He slept with East Enders who were procured for him by Lord Alfred Douglas. He knew them only 'in Braille' - the curtains were never drawn back in the rooms in Oxford where he met those boys. It was the most sordid life you can imagine. And he was bleating about love and dragging the fair name of Mr. Plato into the trial - after a life like that?

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.

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

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.

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