Abatement in the hostility of one's enemies must never be thought to signify they have been won over. It only means that one has ceased to constitute a threat.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

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

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

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

If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

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.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

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

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.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

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.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone- but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

Manners are love in a cool climate.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

Men get laid, but women get screwed.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

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

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.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

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. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

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.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

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.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

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

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

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
- Quentin Crisp Quote

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

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