Quentin Crisp Quotes

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 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.

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.

I acquiesced in this on the grounds that the most anyone can expect from a holiday is a change of agony.

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.

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."

Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.

Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.

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.

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.

There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.

When stripped, I looked less like "Il David" than a plucked chicken that died of myxomatosis.

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.

If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.

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.