Quentin Crisp Quotes

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

"You should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster"

"There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse."

"The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it"

"Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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?"

"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."

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

"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."

"If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style."

"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."

"Men get laid, but women get screwed."

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

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

"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."