Abatement in the hostility of one's enemies must never be thought to signify they have been won over. It only means that one has ceased to constitute a threat.
Quentin Crisp

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
Quentin Crisp

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

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
Quentin Crisp

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
Quentin Crisp

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

For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
Quentin Crisp

Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.
Quentin Crisp

However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
Quentin Crisp

I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.
Quentin Crisp


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.
Quentin Crisp

If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
Quentin Crisp

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.
Quentin Crisp

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
Quentin Crisp

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.
Quentin Crisp

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

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.
Quentin Crisp

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
Quentin Crisp

Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
Quentin Crisp

Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone- but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
Quentin Crisp