Quotes By Quentin Crisp

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

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.

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

Manners are love in a cool climate.

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