Quentin Crisp Quotes - Page 6

Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.

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

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to a drama school. And I said, "What did they teach you?" And she said, "They taught me to be a candle burning in an empty room." I'm happy to say she was laughing while she said it, but she meant it. I've never learned to be a candle burning in an empty room. So I go on the screen, and I say whatever I'm told to say.

Happiness is the only thing I understand.

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.

As a test of the closeness of your relationship with the world, sex could never be a patch on being murdered. (That's when someone really does risk his life for you.)

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

A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.

I never say 'No' to anything.

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

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!

I am asked how to remain young, and I say 'Never, never work.' And that, of course, is the secret of it.

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.

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

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

Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.

You don't have to do anything.

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

I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.

Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.

Everybody who's been on television more than once wears in public an expression of fatuous affability. Because you may be addressed at any moment by somebody.

The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds is just so unlikely I can't go along with it.

When asked to give advice, I do of course give it, because I give whatever I am asked to give.