Quentin Crisp Quotes - Page 2

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?'

If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.

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.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?

When asked, 'Shall I tell my mother I'm gay?', I reply, 'Never tell your mother anything.

The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.

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.

You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.

The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who...have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies.

Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.

The message that 'love' will solve all of our problems is repeated incessantly in contemporary culture - like a philosophical tom tom. It would be closer to the truth to say that love is a contagious and virulent disease which leaves a victim in a state of near imbecility, paralysis, profound melancholia, and sometimes culminates in death.

You will survive if you believe in yourself.

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

When I was young, I and the whole world thought that all homosexuals were effeminate. And of course they're not. You can just see which people are effeminate; that's the only difference. So, I became a prototype of the effeminate man, because I was conspicuously effeminate. But camp is not something I do, it's something I am.

To lose is not always failure.

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!

It may be true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance, but it's also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts.

I lost the love of all the homosexuals in the world by saying that Princess Diana was trash and got what she deserved. She could have been Queen of England - and she was swanning about Paris with Arabs. What disgraceful behavior. Going about saying she wanted to be the queen of hearts. The vulgarity of it is so overpowering.

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.