Quentin Crisp Quotes

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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."

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

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

"Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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 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."