Quentin Crisp
actor, graphic designer, autobiographer, writer, socialite, model, stage actor, film actor, television actor
Read on Wikipedia1908 – 1999
All Quotes by Quentin Crisp
“Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality.”
“If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.”
“Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.”
“Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.”
“Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.”
“If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.”
“Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.”
“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.”
“I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. 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.”
“A pinch of notoriety will do.”
“I have come to think that both sex and politics are a mistake and that any attempt to establish a connection between the two is the greatest error of all.”
“Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.”
“Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.”
“The rest of the world in which I lived was still stumbling about in search of a weapon with which to exterminate this monster [homosexuality] whose shape and size were not yet known or even guessed at. It was thought to be Greek in origin, smaller than socialism but more deadly, especially to children.”
“Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.”
“Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going.”
“To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.”
“I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to "Hamlet" on the grounds that I knew who won.”
“I acquiesced in this on the grounds that the most anyone can expect from a holiday is a change of agony.”
“As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, "they can’t leave anything alone."”
“The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze.”
“Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.”
“The proprietor had hair so red that pigmentation had flowed out into every visible inch of his skin and even into the pinks of his eyes, as the colour of flowering cherry trees stains their leaves.”
“I never saw Portsmouth by day.”
“All liaisons between homosexuals are conducted as though they were between a chorus girl and a bishop. In some cases both parties think they are bishops.”
“I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!”
“There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.”
“The measure of woman’s distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr’s crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.”
“God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen. It had become obvious that he was never going to do a thing I said.”
“The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn’t even want the beastly thing.”
“You'll never be wanted," [a draft board official] said, and thrust at me a smaller piece of paper. This described me as being incapable of being graded in grades A, B, etc., because I suffered from sexual perversion. When the story of my disgrace became one of the contemporary fables of Chelsea, a certain Miss Marshall said, "I don't much care for the expression 'suffering from.' Shouldn't it be 'glorying in'?”
“When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I lived in Clerkenwell that the only complete solution to my problems was suicide. I never brought it off. I was afraid... Hopelessness was thinly spread like a drizzle over my whole outlook. But, in an emergency, I could not find a puddle of despondency deep enough to drown in.”
“Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.”
“If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.”
“Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.”
“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?”
“Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.”
“When stripped, I looked less like "Il David" than a plucked chicken that died of myxomatosis.”
“The young always have the same problem — how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this problem by defying their elders and copying each other.”
“I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east.”
“Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbours.”
“I became one of the stately homos of England.”
“I now know that if you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist.”
“The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, "I wish you hadn’t made every line funny. It’s so depressing."”
“The low dive had set a standard that only middle-aged hooligans could remember and to which they looked back as Mrs Lot at Sodom.”
“Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is for a little while. It is alimony that is for ever.”
“Many [hooligans] discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots and, greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope. The fathers superior of the order do not try to influence their children in Satan; they merely shake their heads in sorrow. They know that the apostate must work out his own damnation.”
“Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he..." This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him."”
“He explained to me that he wanted a simple boy-meets-girl story with lyrics. This I felt was quite beyond my capabilities. I did not know any boys who met girls.”
“I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.”
“[To read a novel or see a play was to drink life through a straw — to smoke it through a filter-tip. If we were not afraid of blackening our teeth or riddling our lungs with cancer — if we were a dauntless race of men with strong digestions — we would be able to devour life without the aid of these over-civilized devices.”
“It would be impossible to get through the kind of life that I have known without accumulating a vast unused stockpile of rage. Retaliation, though, was a luxury I could never afford. On the physical level I was too feeble. On any other I was not rich enough. I never dared to be rude to anyone. I never knew that I might not need him later. Long after fantasies of sexual excess had ceased to torment me, my imagination was inflamed by lurid day-dreams of having my revenge on the world.”
“Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH.”
“An autobiography is obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.”
“We think we write definitively of those parts of our nature that are dead and therefore beyond change, but that which writes is still changing — still in doubt. Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.”