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1 " 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
2 " The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right. "
3 " I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds. "
4 " There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse. "
5 " The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call “the trouble with you.” Nevertheless, the journey is worth making. "
6 " All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth. "
― Quentin Crisp , How to Have a Lifestyle
7 " Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress. "
8 " If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left. "
― Quentin Crisp , The Naked Civil Servant
9 " Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art...I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise. "
10 " When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe? "
― Quentin Crisp , The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp
11 " Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then? "
12 " Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are. "
13 " Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul. "
14 " If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style. "
― Quentin Crisp , The Naked Civil Servant; How To Become A Virgin; Resident Alien
15 " My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it. "
16 " Charisma is the ability to influence without logic. "
17 " If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style. "
18 " 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. "
19 " There are a lot of people in the world who are not loved and we must make an inconspicuous dash to them to save them, to help them. To live a life and not be loved is a terrible thing. And we can spare them that if we are attentive. "
20 " Zealots are totally incapable of any emotion other than rage. It is an unalterable law that people who claim to care about the human race are utterly indifferent to the sufferings of individuals. "
― Quentin Crisp , The Last Word: An Autobiography
