Quentin Crisp quotes - page 3

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." (Quentin Crisp)
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." View quote
Quentin Crisp
You talk for talking's sake,' she hissed. I asked if that was bad. 'I mean it,' the girl replied. 'You talk for talking's sake.' I had heard her the first time and had understood the words but not the contempt with which they were charged. 'Would you be equally annoyed,' I asked, 'if I danced for dancing's sake? [...] I should have said, 'Would you hate me if I lived for living's sake?' This would have been the total question - the one to which a full reply could have saved the world. View quote
Quentin Crisp
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'? View quote
Quentin Crisp
The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It's not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it's the resentment that settles on your face. View quote
Quentin Crisp
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. View quote
Quentin Crisp
To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody. View quote
Quentin Crisp
Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster. View quote
Quentin Crisp
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. View quote
Quentin Crisp
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. View quote
Quentin Crisp
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. (Quentin Crisp)
A pinch of notoriety will do. View quote
Quentin Crisp
To minimize my guilt at going to the pictures - to call this wanton pursuit of an effete pleasure by another name - I needed movie companions as drunkards need drinking partners. If I entered a cinema alone, God might plunge his arm through the roof of the auditorium booming in a stereophonic voice, "And you, Crisp, what are you doing here?" I would never have dared reply, "I'm just enjoying myself, Lord." I remembered too well what happened to Mr and Mrs Adam. A commissionaire with a flaming sword came and asked them to leave. View quote
Quentin Crisp
Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked. View quote
Quentin Crisp
If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable. View quote
Quentin Crisp
There are girls who do not like real life... Some of these girls are innocent enough to think that these unreal friendships [with homosexuals] will lead to true love - a kind of sexual intercourse that will happen to them without their having to take too horribly much notice. Even those who are sufficiently sophisticated to know that this will not be so persist in these relationships. They provide an opportunity to lavish emotion on a pseudo-man without paying the price that in heterosexual circumstances would be inevitable. View quote
Quentin Crisp
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. View quote
Quentin Crisp
When stripped, I looked less like "Il David" than a plucked chicken that died of myxomatosis. View quote
Quentin Crisp
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. View quote
Quentin Crisp
I acquiesced in this on the grounds that the most anyone can expect from a holiday is a change of agony. View quote
Quentin Crisp
[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. (Quentin Crisp)
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. View quote
Quentin Crisp
My fingers will not type the words "her money became a burden to her" but I do think that her wealth was like a lazy servant - better than nothing but a source of unremitting annoyance because it never filled her most urgent needs. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Quentin Crisp