272 Quotes by Quentin Crisp

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

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

Assoon as I stepped out of my mother's womb on to dry land, I realized that I had made a mistake?but the trouble with children is that they are not returnable.

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.

I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.

To minimize my guilt at going to the pictures - to call this wanton pursuit of an effete pleasure by another name - I needed movie companions as drunkards need drinking partners. If I entered a cinema alone, God might plunge his arm through the roof of the auditorium booming in a stereophonic voice, 'And you, Crisp, what are you doing here?' I would never have dared reply, 'I'm just enjoying myself, Lord.'

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.

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

The court was not previously aware of the prisoner's many accomplishments. In view of these, we see fit to impose the death penalty.