Quentin Crisp Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.

  Quentin Crisp

  Humor, Getting What You Want, Way

  19 Copy quote

• To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.

  Quentin Crisp

  Love, Destiny, Extra Effort

  16 Copy quote

• The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call “the trouble with you.” Nevertheless, the journey is worth making.

  Quentin Crisp

  Journey, Long, Style

  7 Copy quote

• If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.

  Quentin Crisp

  Men, Garden, Soul

  14 Copy quote

• Other-cheekism is not only a way of purifying the soul, it is also part of every weak person's survival kit.

  Quentin Crisp

  Soul, Forgiving, Survival

  10 Copy quote

• I approach my life with logic. I do not act on impulse or emotion. I very seldom find that I say, 'And then I can't think what came over me, but I did this or that or the other.' I nearly always know how I will act and I nearly always act in that way. I don't catch myself out in embarrassing situations because I've acted without forethought. I calculate what I will do.

  Quentin Crisp

  Thinking, Way, Emotion

  10 Copy quote

• Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

  Quentin Crisp

  Character, Power, Hands

  172 Copy quote

• Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.

  Quentin Crisp

  Funny, Mother, Jobs

  1968 The Naked Civil Servant, ch.1.

  9 Copy quote

• Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained. If you have no personality, you may be able to save your face and, possibly, your entire anatomy by following the current fashion, but all we shall know about you, when we see you coming down the street, is that you had enough money to buy a glossy magazine and were sufficiently cunning to work out the cut of the garments shown therein.

  Quentin Crisp

  Fashion, Cutting, Work Out

  5 Copy quote

• Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.

  Quentin Crisp

  Health, Ironic, Disease

  "The Naked Civil Servant". Book by Quentin Crisp, Chapter 21, 1968.

  7 Copy quote

• Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.

  Quentin Crisp

  Religious, War, Ideas

  9 Copy quote

• The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.

  Quentin Crisp

  Gay, Disco Music, Century

  8 Copy quote

• People say to me, "When did you come out?" But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I'd found in an attic, saying, "I am a beautiful princess!" What my parents thought of this, I don't know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.

  Quentin Crisp

  Beautiful, Mother, Real

  Source: www.avclub.com

  10 Copy quote

• The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn't even want the beastly thing.

  Quentin Crisp

  Hands, Desire, Purpose

  "The Naked Civil Servant". Book by Quentin Crisp, Chapter 16, 1968.

  4 Copy quote

• I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.

  Quentin Crisp

  People, Shameless, Share

  "The Naked Civil Servant". Book by Quentin Crisp, Chapter 11, 1968.

  12 Copy quote

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

  Quentin Crisp

  Years, Four, Four Years

  4 Copy quote

• Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.

  Quentin Crisp

  Clothes, Soul, Fabric

  11 Copy quote

• Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

  Quentin Crisp

  Love, Running, Brave

  10 Copy quote

• Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.

  Quentin Crisp

  Men, Touching, Excitement

  "The Naked Civil Servant". The Naked Civil Servant, Chapter 19, 1968.

  4 Copy quote

• Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?

  Quentin Crisp

  Flirty, Flirting, House

  10 Copy quote

• If I were God - and I never understand why I'm not - I should say, "Shop around, I don't think you'll find a better bargain than here."

  Quentin Crisp

  Thinking, Should, Shops

  Source: davidbenson.webs.com

  6 Copy quote

• Vice is its own reward.

  Quentin Crisp

  Vices, Rewards, Virtue

  54 Copy quote

• It's a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.

  Quentin Crisp

  People, Pay, Strange

  Source: www.avclub.com

  10 Copy quote

• I don't really act. I say the words the way I would say them if I meant them.

  Quentin Crisp

  Way, Ifs

  Source: www.avclub.com

  5 Copy quote

• If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

  Quentin Crisp

  Bartender, Ifs

  10 Copy quote

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