Quotes by Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp

English writer and actor

Alive from: 1908-1999

Category: Movie | Writers (Contemporary)

Quotes 1 till 15 of 37.

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  Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
  Source: Manners from Heaven: A Divine Guide to Good Behaviour (1984) ch. 7

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  A gentleman doesn't pounce he glides. If a woman sits on a piece of furniture which permits your sitting beside her, you are free to regard this as an invitation, though not an unequivocal one.

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  An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

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  Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality.
  Source: How to Become a Virgin (1981) Ch. 6

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  Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

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

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  However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.

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  I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.
  Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968) Ch. 27

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  I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.

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  If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.

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  If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

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  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.

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  Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?

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  It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough.

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  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.