Quentin Crisp Quotes

Europeans are quarrelsome.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

God is so angry. All that power, and so mean with it.

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.

The court was not previously aware of the prisoner's many accomplishments. In view of these, we see fit to impose the death penalty.

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

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.

Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who...have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies.

Flowers are words even a baby can understand.

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.

You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.

To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

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.

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.)

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.

I am a stereotype. I am an effeminate man.