Quotes from Quentin Crisp

Style is not the man; it is something better. It is a dizzy, dazzling structure that he erects about himself using as building materials selected elements from his own character.

Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.

Without knowing it, I was acquiring that haughty bearing which is characteristic of so many eccentrics. What other expression would you expect to find on the face of anyone who knows that if he turns his head too quickly, he will see on the faces of others glares of stark terror or grimaces of hatred? Aloofness is the posture of self-defense.

Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who, before anything has reared its ugly head, have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies. The habit fitted snugly into my well-established world of make-believe.

Whatever has gone on in the outer world has passed me by. But I think if anyone said to me, 'if you go on like this life will pass you by,' I would reply, 'thank God for that, I nearly got mixed up in the beastly thing.

Sexual intercourse is a poor substitute for masturbation.

It's explained that all relationship 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.

If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

It was not so much that I longed for death as that I didn't long for life.

The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.

Then my hostess said, "Oh, Denis (as my name was before I dyed it) never plays the part of a man.

Exhibitionists have no friends, no friends at all.

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable

Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.

Sex is the last resort of the miserable

I did not know that a reputation for wit is earned not by making jokes, but by laughing at the pleasantries of others.

Development of character consists solely in moving towards self-sufficiency.

The place where no harm can come is the place where nothing at all can come.

It was only in the idealistic dreams of H.G. Wells that people became nicer as they acquired wealth.

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.

Mr Melly had to be obscene to be believed

You first have to find who you are. Then, you have to be it like mad.

When I was a child my ineptitude was a burden to my parents and my teachers. They could not see that it was a greater burden to me. I wondered wanly if I would ever discover how to do anything well. At long last I have learned something even better - how not to do anything at all.