Quentin Crisp Quotes

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!

To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

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.

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

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.

"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'?"

As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, "they can’t leave anything alone."

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.

I never saw Portsmouth by day.

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.

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.

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 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.

Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is for a little while. It is alimony that is for ever.

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.