Quentin Crisp Quotes

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

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.

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."

I now know that if you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist.

I became one of the stately homos of England.

Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbours.

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.

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.

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.

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

Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.

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

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

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

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.