Quentin Crisp
71 quotes
Biography
Quentin Crisp was an English raconteur whose personal expression broke social norms of the era. Crisp gained notoriety for the 1968 memoir The Naked Civil Servant, popularized by its 1975 screen adaptation.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it."
"I have come to think that both sex and politics are a mistake and that any attempt to establish a connection between the two is the greatest error of all."
"A pinch of notoriety will do."
"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."
"The rest of the world in which I lived was still stumbling about in search of a weapon with which to exterminate this monster [homosexuality] whose shape and size were not yet known or even guessed at. It was thought to be Greek in origin, smaller than socialism but more deadly, especially to children."
"Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice."
"Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going."
"To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody."
"I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to "Hamlet" on the grounds that I knew who won."
"I acquiesced in this on the grounds that the most anyone can expect from a holiday is a change of agony."
"As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, "they can’t leave anything alone.""
"The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze."
"The proprietor had hair so red that pigmentation had flowed out into every visible inch of his skin and even into the pinks of his eyes, as the colour of flowering cherry trees stains their leaves."
"I never saw Portsmouth by day."
"All liaisons between homosexuals are conducted as though they were between a chorus girl and a bishop. In some cases both parties think they are bishops."
"I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!"
"There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse."
"The measure of woman’s distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr’s crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain."
"God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen. It had become obvious that he was never going to do a thing I said."
"The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn’t even want the beastly thing."
"You'll never be wanted," [a draft board official] said, and thrust at me a smaller piece of paper. This described me as being incapable of being graded in grades A, B, etc., because I suffered from sexual perversion. When the story of my disgrace became one of the contemporary fables of Chelsea, a certain Miss Marshall said, "I don't much care for the expression 'suffering from.' Shouldn't it be 'glorying in'?"
"When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I lived in Clerkenwell that the only complete solution to my problems was suicide. I never brought it off. I was afraid... Hopelessness was thinly spread like a drizzle over my whole outlook. But, in an emergency, I could not find a puddle of despondency deep enough to drown in."