1908-, British Author
A gentleman doesn't pounce he glides. If a woman sits on a piece of furniture which permits your sitting beside her, you are free to regard this as an invitation, though not an unequivocal one.
Quentin Crisp – [Seduction]
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
Quentin Crisp – [Autobiography]
Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: ''If you truly love me, kill the bartender.''
Quentin Crisp – [Men]
Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
Quentin Crisp – [Respectability]
Euphemisms are not, as many young people think, useless verbiage for that which can and should be said bluntly; they are like secret agents on a delicate mission, they must airily pass by a stinking mess with barely so much as a nod of the head, make their point of constructive criticism and continue on in calm forbearance. Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
Quentin Crisp – [Tact and Tactfulness]
However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
Quentin Crisp – [Police]
I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.
Quentin Crisp – [Involvement]
If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.
Quentin Crisp – [Family]
If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.
Quentin Crisp – [Writers and Writing]
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.
Quentin Crisp – [Outcasts]
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
Quentin Crisp – [Flirting]
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.
Quentin Crisp – [Relationships]
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.
Quentin Crisp – [Prejudice]
Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.
Quentin Crisp – [Neighbors]
Life is a game in which the rules are constantly changing; nothing spoils a game more than those who take it seriously. Adultery? Phooey! You should never subjugate yourself to another nor seek the subjugation of someone else to yourself. If you follow that Crispian principle you will be able to say ''Phooey,'' too, instead of reaching for your gun when you fancy yourself betrayed.
Quentin Crisp – [Adultery]
Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
Quentin Crisp – [Life and Living]
Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
Quentin Crisp – [Living Together]
Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
Quentin Crisp – [Love]
Manners are love in a cool climate.
Quentin Crisp – [Manners]
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
Quentin Crisp – [Parents and Parenting]