Quentin Crisp

All America is much the same.

— Quentin Crisp

I never really found out what love was.

— Quentin Crisp

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

— Quentin Crisp

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.

— Quentin Crisp

I don't think I have a tragic demeanor.

— Quentin Crisp

“It is no longer possible to be exotic.”

— Quentin Crisp

To lose is not always failure.

— Quentin Crisp

I am the last of Britain's stately homos.

— Quentin Crisp

The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.

— Quentin Crisp

You don't have to deal with anyone in America. They accept you the way you are.

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

The Scots are very hospitable; almost as hospitable as the Americans.

— Quentin Crisp

“Sexual intercourse is a poor substitute for masturbation.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

The court was not previously aware of the prisoner's many accomplishments. In view of these, we see fit to impose the death…

— Quentin Crisp

“Then my hostess said, "Oh, Denis (as my name was before I dyed it) never plays the part of a man.”

— Quentin Crisp

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and…

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds…

— Quentin Crisp

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically - for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block…

— Quentin Crisp

The proprietor had hair so red that pigmentation had flowed out into every visible inch of his skin and even into the…

— Quentin Crisp

I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of…

— Quentin Crisp

I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by…

— Quentin Crisp

I now realize that education is a last wild effort on the part of the authorities to prevent an overdose of leisure…

— Quentin Crisp

Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when…

— Quentin Crisp

I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers,…

— Quentin Crisp

“I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force,…

— Quentin Crisp

When I was young, we thought that Oscar Wilde was a great nobleman who had thrown his life away for love. Nothing…

— Quentin Crisp

I approach my life with logic. I do not act on impulse or emotion. I very seldom find that I say, 'And…

— Quentin Crisp

Central Europe is full of little countries standing shoulder to shoulder with no window to the sea. They are like the passengers…

— Quentin Crisp

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the…

— Quentin Crisp

“When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I had lived in Clerkenwell that…

— Quentin Crisp

I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to…

— Quentin Crisp

Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I…

— Quentin Crisp

“Without knowing it, I was acquiring that haughty bearing which is characteristic of so many eccentrics. What other expression would you expect…

— Quentin Crisp