Quotes from Quentin Crisp

You're queer, I'll kill you.' I could only ask if the speaker wanted an appointment.

It is hard enough to share wealth without being involved in undignified scenes; shared poverty consists of nothing else.

Zealots are totally incapable of any emotion other than rage. It is an unalterable law that people who claim to care about the human race are utterly indifferent to the sufferings of individuals.

Lord Snow says that every man may be permitted his own clichés. But this is not enough. He must invent his own clichés and then persist in them until, if other people use them, their source is instantly recognizable. Thus plagiarism shall be turned into homage.

Now I've done and said all I can do and say. I've come to the end of my personality, and now if I want anything it's peace, quiet. The ability, the opportunity to stay in my room and just stagger on. I suppose what I want, in a way, is death.

Even in childhood I was mad about men in uniform.

Perhaps "camp" is set in the 'twenties because after that differences between the sexes - especially visible differences - began to fade. This, of course, has never mattered to women in the least. They know they are women. To homosexuals, who must, with every breath they draw, with every step they take, demonstrate that they are feminine, it is frustrating. They look back in sorrow to that more formal era and try to relive it.

It was my policy never to spend more than half my wages so as not to have to work for more than half my days on earth.

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

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

I am consumed perpetually by an inner spiritual flame.

There is no great Dark Man !!!

You see, the universe has no meaning and there was no purpose in my being born into it. I never listen to conversations which begin, 'We are all put into the world for...' because we weren't put into the world. We just happened and we have no purpose and that's fine.

The scheme entered her head presumably because nature abhors a vacuum

My fingers will not type the words 'her money became a burden to her' but I do think that her wealth was like a lazy servant — better than nothing but a source of unremitting annoyance because it never filled her most urgent needs.

Drawing is a science, painting is just something for the long winter evenings.

It doesn't matter what other people think of you. What matters is what you think of yourself.

People have always imagined, or pretended to imagine, that I seek to provoke hostile attention. This is rubbish. What I want is to be accepted by other people without bevelling down my individuality to please them — because if I do that, all the attention, all the friendship, all the hospitality that I receive is really for somebody else of the same name.

D.H. Lawrence said that it was not living life that mattered but watching it be lived. I would say that it was not watching life that mattered but explaining what you saw.

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to a mountain of self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused, hurt and hungry ...

There is no great dark man. Even under an exterior as rugged as a mountain range, there lurks the same wounded, wincing psyche that cripples the rest of us. Where we are led to think we will find strength, we shall discover force; where we hope for ruthlessness, we shall unearth spite; and when we think we are clinging desperately to a rock, it is falling upon us.

By the time the last Americans had vanished into thin Englishmen I was nearly forty.

Conversation did not flow with the drink; it drowned in it.

For the first few years after such a law was passed there might occasionally be undignified scenes, but in Britain individual liberty is so often curtailed for the common good. Order would soon prevail.