Quotes from Quentin Crisp

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

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

If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.

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.

You should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.

The young always have the same problem -- how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

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.

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.

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

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

Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.

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

The formula for a successful relationship is simple: Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities, but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

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.

I became one of the stately homos of England.

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?

This school was on top of a hill so that God could see everything that went on. It looked like a cross between a prison and a church and it was.