Quentin Crisp

You can behave as badly as you like in America. Nobody notices.

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

“Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who, before anything has reared…

— Quentin Crisp

I am the last of Britain's stately homos.

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial…

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

Most men when they make up their faces, the makeup stands forward, and their faces are behind.

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

Women have decided to be people, which is a great mistake. Women were nicer than people.

— Quentin Crisp

Sex is the last refuge of the misreable.

— Quentin Crisp

I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could…

— Quentin Crisp

If you live in America, you don't have to work. You can just drift along in the smiling and nodding racket.

— Quentin Crisp

“I was from birth an object of mild ridicule because of my movements - especially the perpetual flutter of my hands -…

— Quentin Crisp

If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his…

— Quentin Crisp

“Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.”

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.

— Quentin Crisp

To lose is not always failure.

— Quentin Crisp

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this…

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality.

— Quentin Crisp

As a test of the closeness of your relationship with the world, sex could never be a patch on being murdered. (That's…

— Quentin Crisp

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For…

— 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