110+ Quentin Crisp Quotes On Death, Friendship And Dusting

Quentin Crisp was an English writer, raconteur and actor. He was best known for his memoir The Naked Civil Servant, which was adapted into a television film starring John Hurt. Crisp was known for his wit and sharp observations of the human condition. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Quentin Crisp on love, death, friendship.

Top 10 Quentin Crisp Quotes

1. Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
2. 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.
3. Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.
4. In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.
5. Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
6. My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
7. Vice is its own reward.
8. Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
9. 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.
10. 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.

Quentin Crisp Image Quotes

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

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

Quentin Crisp Short Quotes

• The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
• Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
• For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
• Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.
• However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
• The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.
• It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.
• Men get laid, but women get screwed.
• Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
• The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.

Quentin Crisp Quotes About Love

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

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

To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny. — Quentin Crisp

The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity. — Quentin Crisp

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

One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend. — Quentin Crisp

Manners are love in a cool climate. — Quentin Crisp

If you truly love me, kill the bartender. — Quentin Crisp

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

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

Quentin Crisp Quotes About Style

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

Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings, they did it by killing all those who opposed them. If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style. — Quentin Crisp

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

Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it. — Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp Quotes About People

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. — Quentin Crisp

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

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

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. — Quentin Crisp

It's a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy. — Quentin Crisp

Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH. — Quentin Crisp

What matters is not whether you put your fork or knife together because you've finished your meal, or something like that. What matters is that you don't offend people, or hurt their feelings by mistake by saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing. — Quentin Crisp

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

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us. — Quentin Crisp

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. — Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp Quotes About Life

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

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

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

What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person. — Quentin Crisp

The measure of woman's distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr's crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain. — Quentin Crisp

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.) — Quentin Crisp

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

My function in life was to render clear what was already blindingly conspicuous. — Quentin Crisp

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn't even want the beastly thing. — Quentin Crisp

Any film is at least better than real life. — Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp Quotes About Told

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

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

I am told that you regret not what you did but what you didn't do; and so that's why I do everything, so as not to have any regrets. — Quentin Crisp

As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, "they can't leave anything alone." — Quentin Crisp

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 Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. — Quentin Crisp

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

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. — 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

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

For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change. — Quentin Crisp

Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it. — Quentin Crisp

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

The proprietor had hair so red that pigmentation had flowed out into every visible inch of his skin and even into the pinks of his eyes, as the colour of flowering cherry trees stains their leaves. — Quentin Crisp

All liaisons between homosexuals are conducted as though they were between a chorus girl and a bishop. In some cases both parties think they are bishops. — Quentin Crisp

The flagrantly gay Quentin Crisp dealt with homophobic bullying by refusing to bow to its onslaught. His number listed in the phone directory, he responded to derogatory remarks accompanied with a stated intent to kill him by asking, "Would you like to make an appointment?" — Quentin Crisp

Many [hooligans] discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots and, greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope. The fathers superior of the order do not try to influence their children in Satan; they merely shake their heads in sorrow. They know that the apostate must work out his own damnation. — Quentin Crisp

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

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. — Quentin Crisp

Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul. — Quentin Crisp

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody. — Quentin Crisp

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

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

What is privacy if not for invading? — Quentin Crisp

Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality. — Quentin Crisp

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

A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac. — Quentin Crisp

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable. — Quentin Crisp

I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned. — Quentin Crisp

Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is for a little while. It is alimony that is for ever. — Quentin Crisp

Los Angeles is just New York lying down. — Quentin Crisp

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. — 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 you don't stay in some days, you can't recharge your batteries. — Quentin Crisp

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

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

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. — Quentin Crisp

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

The absolute nothingness of death is a blessing. Something to look forward to. — Quentin Crisp

Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level. — Quentin Crisp

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. — Quentin Crisp

When I was young, I and the whole world thought that all homosexuals were effeminate. And of course they're not. You can just see which people are effeminate; that's the only difference. So, I became a prototype of the effeminate man, because I was conspicuously effeminate. But camp is not something I do, it's something I am. — Quentin Crisp

Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan. — Quentin Crisp

The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen. — 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

I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to "Hamlet" on the grounds that I knew who won. — Quentin Crisp

The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds is just so unlikely I can't go along with it. — Quentin Crisp

Assoon as I stepped out of my mother's womb on to dry land, I realized that I had made a mistake?but the trouble with children is that they are not returnable. — 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

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. — Quentin Crisp

The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze. — Quentin Crisp

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

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

I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do? — Quentin Crisp

If one is not going to take the necessary precautions to avoid having parents, one must undertake to bring them up. — Quentin Crisp

Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors. — 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

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

In New York, I find people so courteous and so generous. Free drinks in bars. Free taxi rides. — Quentin Crisp

You will survive if you believe in yourself. — Quentin Crisp

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

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. — Quentin Crisp

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

Charisma is the ability to influence without logic. — Quentin Crisp

Life Lessons by Quentin Crisp

1. Quentin Crisp taught that self-acceptance is the key to finding true happiness and living an authentic life. He believed that we should not be ashamed of who we are and that we should embrace our differences and unique qualities.
2. He also emphasized the importance of being kind and generous to others, and of living life with an open heart and an open mind.
3. Finally, he encouraged us to take risks and to never be afraid to be ourselves, even if it means going against the grain or doing something that is unpopular.