272 Quotes by Quentin Crisp

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.

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.

Humor I think of as the outward sign of the ability to look at events and situations from more than one point of view. It is this gift that keeps us all from living in a perpetual rage.

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.

You must make small steps into the air of being yourself. Find yourself in an empty landscape, build your character, and then spend the rest of your life demonstrating it.

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.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.

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.