Quentin Crisp Quotes

I've never not been famous.

If I were God - and I never understand why I'm not - I should say, "Shop around, I don't think you'll find a better bargain than here."

Women have decided to be people, which is a great mistake. Women were nicer than people.

Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): "What's the matter, sexy? Don't you like dehydrated fruit?

I don't really act. I say the words the way I would say them if I meant them.

In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

You can't be a person and a lady. If you're a person, you can open the damned door yourself.

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

The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.

The gymnasiacs of Venice, in California, are so addicted to these practices that there has arisen a nation of men who can no longer put their arms against their sides

Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.

I am the last of Britain's stately homos.

If one is not going to take the necessary precautions to avoid having parents, one must undertake to bring them up.

The world was very feminine when I was young. And now it's very masculine.

In New York, I find people so courteous and so generous. Free drinks in bars. Free taxi rides.

To say a thing is natural is to condone it, never to praise it.

I can't remember ever having a tragic demeanor. Although my life was tragedy.

In Manhattan, when you're out of the front door, you're on, and you have to be ready to smile and speak to people.

England is very dreary, but I'm a people person.

Europeans are quarrelsome.

What better proof of love can there be than money? A ten-shilling note shows incontrovertibly just how mad about you a man is.

The Americans, of course, are quite dotty with hospitality.

Flowers are words even a baby can understand.

The more people one has to love, the more one's capacity to love stretches.

You don't have to deal with anyone in America. They accept you the way you are.

People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.

I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.

Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.

Happiness is the only thing I understand.

I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.

As we all know from witnessing the consuming jealousy of husbands who are never faithful, people do not confine themselves to the emotions to which they are entitled.

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

I had a friend who had two degrees of being made up: when invited I would say 'Can I make up?' and he would say 'Oh yes - tinted?', or he would say, 'Oh yes - clotted?'

I never saw Portsmouth by day.

I was beaten up wherever I went, and people shouted at me and cursed me and threw things at me.

America believes in freedom. The English don't believe in it. They don't believe in happiness.

I am a stereotype. I am an effeminate man.

Europeans have quarrelled since the beginning of time.

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

I've always lived in the same way.

I never really found out what love was.

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.

Fear and hatred do not seem to find expression in tears.

I learned very early in life that I was always going to need people more than they needed me

Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.

I'm too old to make drawings.

I don't believe in convention at all. I do what I have to do to stay alive.

I stay in one room, and it's easier to live there, to control it, to make it warm. It seems to me a convenient way to live, and it's cheap.

I don't know how people act. I've never understood that.