Quentin Crisp Quotes - Page 8

You can behave as badly as you like in America. Nobody notices.

In most cases an act of unwelcome sex is no more bother than being vaccinated, so there's no point going on about it as if it werea fate worse than death. With skill and good manners you can avoid having to make the sacrifice, but should you find yourself in a compromising situation largely of your own making, you should stop defending your virtue and start worrying about your maturity. It will give you something to think about while the savage pumper bangs away.

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.

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

Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.

In fact I try to spend at least one, if not two days without ever leaving my room. Because if I didn't, when would I recharge my batteries?

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

I am told that you regret not what you did but what you didn't do; and so that's why I do everything, so as not to have any regrets.

That's the only sense in which I've been lucky: I have the kind of face to which cosmetics could be applied.

The proprietor had hair so red that pigmentation had flowed out into every visible inch of his skin and even into the pinks of his eyes, as the colour of flowering cherry trees stains their leaves.

It's written into the Constitution that you're allowed to pursue happiness. In England it would be considered a frivolous objective.

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

I don't think I have a tragic demeanor.

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.

I'm too old to make drawings.

I came first to America in 1977 at the invitation of a man who wanted to make my life story into a musical. But my agent said it was not to be and it was never done. So I went back, but I'd seen New York, and I wanted to live there. Because everybody talks to you in the street. See, nobody talks to you in England.

I've always lived in the same way.

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 read all the books I could find about manners, and the extraordinary thing was, in all books up to the end of the Second World War, most were directed at how to comport yourself in the presence of the ladies.

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

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

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

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

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.

Nearly always when actors are approached by the beauticians, they try to avoid the dabs that the beauticians put on their faces. They dodge them.