Quotes from Quentin Crisp

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.

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

What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person.

I never really found out what love was.

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.

Never get involved with someone who wants to change you

As we all know from witnessing the consuming jealousy of husbands who are never faithful, people do not confine themselves to the emotions to which they are entitled.

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

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

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 am asked how to remain young, and I say 'Never, never work.' And that, of course, is the secret of it.

Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.

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

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

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

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.

If you live in America, you don't have to work. You can just drift along in the smiling and nodding racket.

For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

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.

Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.

Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings, they did it by killing all those who opposed them. If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.

To lose is not always failure.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.