Quentin Crisp
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.Collection: Parenting
The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.Collection: Relationship
Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.Collection: Funny
Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.Collection: Intelligence
Manners are love in a cool climate.Collection: Cool
If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.Collection: Failure
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.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Happiness
There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.
Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
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?
You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
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.
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.
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.
Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
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.
Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.
For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.
Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
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.
Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
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.
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
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.
Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.
Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
Men get laid, but women get screwed.
The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.
The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.
The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
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.Collection: Stories
Any film is at least better than real life.Collection: Real
Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.Collection: Firsts