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21 " I am consumed perpetually by an inner spiritual flame. "
― Quentin Crisp , The Last Word: An Autobiography
22 " Exhibitionists have no friends, no friends at all. "
― Quentin Crisp , The Naked Civil Servant; How To Become A Virgin; Resident Alien
23 " So black was the way ahead that my progress consisted of long periods of inert despondency punctuated by spasmodic lurches forward towards any small chink of light that I thought I saw ... As the years went by, it did not get lighter but I became accustomed to the dark. "
― Quentin Crisp , The Naked Civil Servant
24 " Whereas in the twentieth century, there was a distinction between men and women, in the twenty-first century the lines of gender will become more and more blurred. "
25 " My fingers will not type the words 'her money became a burden to her' but I do think that her wealth was like a lazy servant — better than nothing but a source of unremitting annoyance because it never filled her most urgent needs. "
― Quentin Crisp , How to Become a Virgin
26 " The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy. "
― Quentin Crisp , Manners from Heaven: A Divine Guide to Good Behaviour
27 " Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper. "
― Quentin Crisp
28 " If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable. "
29 " The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It's not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it's the resentment that settles on your face "
30 " Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked. "
31 " Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave. "
32 " However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police. "
33 " 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. "
34 " Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster. "
35 " It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way. "
36 " You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. "
37 " I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. "
38 " 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. "
39 " The very purpose of existence it to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think of us. "
40 " I now realize that education is a last wild effort on the part of the authorities to prevent an overdose of leisure from driving the world mad. Learning is no longer an improver; it is merely the most expensive time-filler the world has ever known. "
― Quentin Crisp , How to Have a Lifestyle