Quotes from Quentin Crisp

America believes in freedom. The English don't believe in it. They don't believe in happiness.

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

The trouble with European cities is that they are drenched in their history, almost all of which is terrible.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

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.

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.

God is so angry. All that power, and so mean with it.

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

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 I can't go along with it.

The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

In Manhattan, when you're out of the front door, you're on, and you have to be ready to smile and speak to people.

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.

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

You should make no effort to try to join society, stay right where you are. Give your name and serial number and wait for society to come to you.

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

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, "I wish you hadn't made every line funny. It's so depressing."

I can't remember ever having a tragic demeanor. Although my life was tragedy.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

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.