Quotes by Quentin Crisp

“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.”

“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 ...”

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

“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 h...”

“If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other ...”

“Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art...I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.”

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

“All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class...”

“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...”

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

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

“If at first you dont succeed, failure may be your style.”

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

“Manners are love in a cool climate.”

“The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Developme...”

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

“The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.”

“It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.”

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