272 Quotes by Quentin Crisp

All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

There is no great dark man.Even under an exterior as rugged as a mountain range, there lurks the same wounded, wincing psyche that cripples the rest of us. Where we are led to think we will find strength, we shall discover force; where we hope for ruthlessness, we shall unearth spite; and when we think we are clinging desperately to a rock, it is falling upon us.

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

Everyone who is honest is interesting.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.

It doesn’t matter what other people think of you. What matters is what you think of yourself.

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?