Quentin Crisp Quotes

Author Image

Quentin Crisp

Profession : Writer

Birth : December 25, 1908

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

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.

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

Quentin Crisp

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.

Quentin Crisp

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

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

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

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 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.

Quentin Crisp

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

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

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

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.

Quentin Crisp

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

Quentin Crisp

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

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

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

Quentin Crisp

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

Quentin Crisp