Quotes from Quentin Crisp

Everyone who is honest is interesting.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

I have known female whores who spoke very bitterly of their calling. "If they don't like my face, they can put a cushion over it. I know it's not that they're interested in." But to the boys this profession never seemed shameful. It was their daytime occupations for which they felt the need to apologize. In some instances, these were lower class or humdrum or, worst of all, unfeminine. At least whoring was never that.

Among other objections to the image of me was that I hated animals. I still do. I have enough dumb friends without them.

It is no longer possible to be exotic.

Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going.

The increased scale of your operations will lend you respectability.

I don't have any pets. I've got enough dumb friends without them.

If there were no applause and no criticism, who would you be?

Humor I think of as the outward sign of the ability to look at events and situations from more than one point of view. It is this gift that keeps us all from living in a perpetual rage.

In the cafe there was a lot of stylized cattiness, but this was never unkindly meant. Nothing at all was meant by it. It was a formal game of innuendos about other people being older than they said, about their teeth being false and their hair being a wig. Such conversation was thought to be smart and so very feminine. It was better, I need hardly say, to seem like a truly appalling woman than not like a woman at all.

My outlook was so limited that I assumed that all deviates were openly despised and rejected. Their grief and their fear drew my melancholy nature strongly. At first I only wanted to wallow in their misery, but, as time went by, I longed to reach its very essence. Finally I desired to represent it. By this process I managed to shift homosexuality from being a burden to being a cause. The weight lifted and some of the guilt evaporated.

There are a lot of people in the world who are not loved and we must make an inconspicuous dash to them to save them, to help them. To live a life and not be loved is a terrible thing. And we can spare them that if we are attentive.

Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment but of boredom.

As soon as I put my uniform on, the rest of my life solidified around me like a plaster cast. From that moment on, my friends were anyone who could put up with the disgrace; my occupation, any job from which I was not given the sack; my playground, any cafe or restaurant from which I was not barred or any street corner from which the police did not move me on.

You must make small steps into the air of being yourself. Find yourself in an empty landscape, build your character, and then spend the rest of your life demonstrating it.

The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds is just so unlikely that I can't go along with it.

I do what I like anyhow any time. My life is one long holiday.

A little old lady once said to me, 'I have known a great many men. All of them had to be carried every step of the way.

Whereas in the twentieth century, there was a distinction between men and women, in the twenty-first century the lines of gender will become more and more blurred.

Sex] is only a mirage, floating in shimmering mockery before the bulging eyes of middle-aged men as they stumble with little whimpers toward the double bed, that somewhere there is a person that will evoke from them sensations of which they dimly dream they are capable.

I played all games seriously, even nastily. They provided me an enclosed world whose triumphs compensated me somewhat for a life of defeat elsewhere.

The monasteries of Bohemia demand more of their brotherhood than some are prepared to give. The daily routine of back-breaking idleness proves too much for certain novices. The self-inflicted orgies that are the inevitable punishment for the slightest deviation into the bourgeois way of life are more than their frail flesh can stand. Many discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots, and greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope

Brave men hide their deeds as decent folk their alms. They disguise them or make excuses for them.