Quotes from Quentin Crisp

Wojna pomiÄ™dzy pÅ'ciami to jedyny konflikt, w którym obie strony sypiajÄ… z wrogiem.

A lifetime of being constantly at the mercy of others left me, even though mercy was undoubtedly shown, crushed and seething with a lust for tyranny.

All this at the last I dimly saw, but an autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing. We think we write definitely of those parts of our nature that are dead and therefore beyond change, but that which writes is still changing - still in doubt.

It is universally agreed that men are neither heterosexual nor homosexual; they are just sexual.

As my friends became older, many of them married and moved out of Soho into the suburbs where their failure would be less apparent.

Later, I met a woman to whom I said, "If all my family had stood around me as a child and said, 'You're wonderful. You're wonderful. You're wonderful.' after an hour I would have complained, 'You're not saying it loud enough.

Sooner or later the time comes for almost everybody when, although he has sworn to himself he will never utter such sentiments, he declares that the country is going to the dogs, that life has become louder, public manners cruder, and art totally incomprehensible. When, he asks himself, will it all end?

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?

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

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 am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

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

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

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper.

If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.

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

Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.

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.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.

It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.

The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.

Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.

I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.