Quotes By Quentin Crisp

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

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

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.

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.

For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.

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

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.

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.

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

The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.

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

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

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

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?

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

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

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

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 poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as "Soho" poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

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