Quotes By Quentin Crisp

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Manners are love in a cool climate.

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

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

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 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.

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 trouble with children is that they're not returnable.

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

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