Quentin Crisp

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

It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.

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.'

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

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

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

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.

Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.

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 trouble with children is that they're not returnable.

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

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

One of the special beauties of America is that it is the only country in the world where you are not advised to learn the language before entering. Before I ever set out for the United States, I asked a friend if I should study American. His answer was unequivocal. \'On no account,\' he said. \'The more English you sound, the more likely you are to be believed.\'

To say a thing is natural is to condone it, never to praise it.

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Manners are love in a cool climate.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.

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.