Quotes from Quentin Crisp

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

The very purpose of existence it to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think of us.

It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.

The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call "the trouble with you." Nevertheless, the journey is worth making.

Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?

I now realize that education is a last wild effort on the part of the authorities to prevent an overdose of leisure from driving the world mad. Learning is no longer an improver; it is merely the most expensive time-filler the world has ever known.

A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.

Vice is its own reward.

As soon as I stepped out of my mother's womb...I realized that I had made a mistake

I learned very early in life that I was always going to need people more than they needed me.

Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): "What's the matter, sexy? Don't you like dehydrated fruit?

The gymnasiacs of Venice, in California, are so addicted to these practices that there has arisen a nation of men who can no longer put their arms against their sides

What better proof of love can there be than money? A ten-shilling note shows incontrovertibly just how mad about you a man is.

I am a stereotype. I am an effeminate man.

Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.

Most men when they make up their faces, the makeup stands forward, and their faces are behind.

Assoon as I stepped out of my mother's womb on to dry land, I realized that I had made a mistake?but the trouble with children is that they are not returnable.

Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.

If I were God - and I never understand why I'm not - I should say, "Shop around, I don't think you'll find a better bargain than here."

God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen. It had become obvious that he was never going to do a thing I said.

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically - for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist - but then what isn't?

Britain cherishes her eccentrics and wisely holds that the function of government is to build a walled garden in which anarchy can flourish.

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

Happiness is the only thing I understand.