Quentin Crisp Quotes - Page 9

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

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

I have to work in England, but here in America you don't have to work. You can sort of enter the profession of being.

I'm happy. I don't ever have to pay anything, and I don't ever have to wash the dishes, and I don't ever have to behave nicely.

I never miss England.

All this cut-price transcendentalism does not prevent California from being a startlingly physical state. This becomes most obvious where Los Angeles saunters down to the sea. The region is called Venice.

I have known female whores who spoke very bitterly of their calling. "If they don't like my face, they can put a cushion over it. I know it's not that they're interested in." But to the boys this profession never seemed shameful. It was their daytime occupations for which they felt the need to apologize. In some instances, these were lower class or humdrum or, worst of all, unfeminine. At least whoring was never that.

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.

What I wanted most of all was to use sex as a weapon to allure, subjugate, and, if possible, destroy the personality of others.

If sophistication is a matter of being in control of our primary reactions, we may now be sophisticated. At least we shall be fairly confident of ourselves and may, with any luck, be confident of others. Our object will be to enjoy our selves. But to make sure that our names are permanently on the cast list, it will be advisable to be of interest to others. This aim must never be confused with the desire to be popular.

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

God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen. It had become obvious that he was never going to do a thing I said.

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

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.

As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, "they can't leave anything alone."

Central Europe is full of little countries standing shoulder to shoulder with no window to the sea. They are like the passengers in a rush-hour train which has stopped between stations for three centuries. And they all hate one another. And they're all crushed together waving their national flags, clanking their national chains, jabbering their national language.

I have come to think that both sex and politics are a mistake and that any attempt to establish a connection between the two is the greatest error of all.

The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze.

Europeans are quarrelsome.

You see, astrology is like fortune-telling. If you can't get it right, you say, "Well, if Venus was doing something peculiar in the background, that would alter your prognostication--because, of course, astrology is rubbish.

I became one of the stately homos of England.

I've come from a very masculine country to a feminine country. England was very masculine; people went from England to abroad, and they landed from above and they said "These are the gods you will worship, these are the crops you will grow, now go away and do it." Which is a manly attitude. Americans go abroad and they say, "Try not to quarrel so much", which is a feminine attitude.

The United States are a miracle: the division between two states is sometimes a river or a mountain, and sometimes it's a straight line. But nobody says, "That tree really belongs in South Carolina. I shan't do anything about it now, I'll get it back later." I shall go after I am here to London and after that to Potsdam, where Comrade Stalin, Mr Churchill and Harry Truman divided up Europe; and what we see now is the result of that. The Americans would have accepted it. But Europeans don't accept anything.

When I was young, I don't know how, I spent all my time in the presence of married women telling me their troubles. And when I said 'Why did you marry?' they said, 'Oh I married to get away from home.' And when I said, 'And why don't you leave him?' they gave the saddest answer in the world: they said, 'Where would I go?' So they stayed with men they didn't like because they had nowhere to go.

I go wherever my fare is paid.