Quentin Crisp: Trending quotes

“Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.”

“There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.”

“I now know that if you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist.”

“Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.”

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

“You'll never be wanted," [a draft board official] said, and thrust at me a smaller piece of paper. This described me as being incapable of being graded in grades A, B, etc., because I suffered from sexual perversion. When the story of my disgrace became one of the contemporary fables of Chelsea, a certain Miss Marshall said, "I don't much care for the expression 'suffering from.' Shouldn't it be 'glorying in'?”

“However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.”

“The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It's not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it's the resentment that settles on your face”

“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 problem by defying their elders and copying each other.”

“If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.”

“I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. 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.”

“Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper.”

“If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.”

“The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.”

“Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.”

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

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

“There are girls who do not like real life… Some of these girls are innocent enough to think that these unreal friendships [with homosexuals] will lead to true love — a kind of sexual intercourse that will happen to them without their having to take too horribly much notice. Even those who are sufficiently sophisticated to know that this will not be so persist in these relationships. They provide an opportunity to lavish emotion on a pseudo-man without paying the price that in heterosexual circumstances would be inevitable.”