Words matter. These are the best Quentin Crisp Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.
The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
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.
For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.
I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.
There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings.
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
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.
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.
There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.
For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.
The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as ‘Soho’ poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
Manners are love in a cool climate.
It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.
Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
Men get laid, but women get screwed.
Abatement in the hostility of one’s enemies must never be thought to signify they have been won over. It only means that one has ceased to constitute a threat.
I recommend limiting one’s involvement in other people’s lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.
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?
The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
