Quotes by Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp

English writer and actor

Lived from: 1908 - 1999

Category: Movie | Writers (Contemporary) Country: FlagUnited Kingdom

Born: 25 december 1908 Died: 21 november 1999

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

Quotes 1 till 20 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.
    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.
    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.
    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.
    ― Quentin Crisp
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  • Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.
    ― Quentin Crisp
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  • Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
    ― Quentin Crisp
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  • Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
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  • Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
    ― Quentin Crisp
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  • Manners are love in a cool climate.
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Questions and Answers

What are the most famous quotes from Quentin Crisp?

The two most famous quotes from Quentin Crisp are:

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

When did Quentin Crisp live?

Quentin Crisp was born in 1908 and died in the year 1999.