Quentin Crisp > Quotes

“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, The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp

“Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.”
― Quentin Crisp

“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

“I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. 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

“There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.”
― Quentin Crisp

“If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant; How To Become A Virgin; Resident Alien

“Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper.”
― Quentin Crisp

“If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.”
― Quentin Crisp

“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”
― Quentin Crisp

“Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.”
― Quentin Crisp

“The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.”
― Quentin Crisp

“Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.”
― Quentin Crisp

“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

“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.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

“However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.”
― Quentin Crisp

“Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.”
― Quentin Crisp

“It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.”
― Quentin Crisp

“Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.”
― Quentin Crisp

“The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.”
― Quentin Crisp, Manners from Heaven: A Divine Guide to Good Behaviour

“I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.”
― Quentin Crisp

“You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.”
― Quentin Crisp

“The very purpose of existence it to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think of us.”
― Quentin Crisp

“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.”
― Quentin Crisp

“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.”
― Quentin Crisp

“Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?”
― Quentin Crisp

“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.”
― Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle

“A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

“Vice is its own reward.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

“I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.”
― Quentin Crisp, Resident Alien

“As soon as I stepped out of my mother's womb...I realized that I had made a mistake,”
― Quentin Crisp