Quentin Crisp (1908–1999), born Denis Charles Pratt, was an English writer, actor, and openly gay personality known for his candid and flamboyant style. His autobiography, “The Naked Civil Servant” (1951), chronicled his life as a gay man in London, gaining him recognition as a symbol of LGBTQ+ visibility and pride. Crisp moved to New York City, where he continued writing and performing, becoming a prominent figure in artistic circles. His unapologetic embrace of his identity and witty observations made him influential in the LGBTQ+ community. Portrayed by John Hurt in a TV adaptation, Crisp’s life left a lasting impact on discussions of sexuality and identity, contributing to the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.
Quentin Crisp Quotes
1. “Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings, they did it by killing all those who opposed them. If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.”
— Quentin Crisp
2. “If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.”
— Quentin Crisp
3. “The absolute nothingness of death is a blessing. Something to look forward to.”
— Quentin Crisp
4. “There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.”
— Quentin Crisp
5. “Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.”
— Quentin Crisp
6. “Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.”
— Quentin Crisp
7. “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.”
— Quentin Crisp
8. “You will survive if you believe in yourself.”
— Quentin Crisp
9. “What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person.”
— Quentin Crisp
10. “Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.”
— Quentin Crisp
11. “The flagrantly gay Quentin Crisp dealt with homophobic bullying by refusing to bow to its onslaught. His number listed in the phone directory, he responded to derogatory remarks accompanied with a stated intent to kill him by asking, “Would you like to make an appointment?””
— Quentin Crisp
12. “For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.”
— Quentin Crisp
13. “If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.”
— Quentin Crisp
14. “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.”
— Quentin Crisp
15. “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.”
— Quentin Crisp
16. “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.”
— Quentin Crisp
17. “For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.”
— Quentin Crisp
18. “Never get involved with someone who wants to change you.”
— Quentin Crisp
19. “My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.”
— Quentin Crisp
20. “Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.”
— Quentin Crisp
21. “Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.”
— Quentin Crisp
22. “No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.”
— Quentin Crisp
23. “You should make no effort to try to join society, stay right where you are. Give your name and serial number and wait for society to come to you.”
— Quentin Crisp
24. “Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.”
— Quentin Crisp
25. “You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.”
— Quentin Crisp
26. “Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.”
— Quentin Crisp
27. “A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.”
— Quentin Crisp
28. “However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.”
— Quentin Crisp
29. “Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.”
— Quentin Crisp
30. “The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It’s not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it’s the resentment that settles on your face.”
— Quentin Crisp
31. “I am the last of Britain’s stately homos.”
— Quentin Crisp
32. “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.”
— Quentin Crisp
33. “Britain cherishes her eccentrics and wisely holds that the function of government is to build a walled garden in which anarchy can flourish.”
— Quentin Crisp
34. “Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.”
— Quentin Crisp
35. “If you truly love me, kill the bartender.”
— Quentin Crisp
36. “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.”
— Quentin Crisp
37. “Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?”
— Quentin Crisp
38. “I learned very early in life that I was always going to need people more than they needed me.”
— Quentin Crisp
39. “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.”
— Quentin Crisp
40. “Manners are love in a cool climate.”
— Quentin Crisp
41. “I never saw Portsmouth by day.”
— Quentin Crisp
42. “If there were no applause and no criticism, who would you be?”
— Quentin Crisp
43. “Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.”
— Quentin Crisp
44. “The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.”
— Quentin Crisp
45. “The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it.”
— Quentin Crisp
46. “I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.”
— Quentin Crisp
47. “To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.”
— Quentin Crisp
48. “Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.”
— Quentin Crisp
49. “Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is for a little while. It is alimony that is for ever.”
— Quentin Crisp
50. “I don’t have any pets. I’ve got enough dumb friends without them.”
— Quentin Crisp
51. “Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH.”
— Quentin Crisp
52. “One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.”
— Quentin Crisp
53. “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.”
— Quentin Crisp
54. “Exhibitionists have no friends, no friends at all.”
— Quentin Crisp
55. “Los Angeles is just New York lying down.”
— Quentin Crisp
56. “I don’t think you can really be proud of being gay because it isn’t something you’ve done. You can only be proud of not being ashamed.”
— Quentin Crisp
57. “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.”
— Quentin Crisp
58. “Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.”
— Quentin Crisp
59. “Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.”
— Quentin Crisp
60. “There is no Great Dark Man!!!”
— Quentin Crisp
61. “I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.”
— Quentin Crisp
62. “Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.”
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63. “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.”
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64. “You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.”
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65. “Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.”
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66. “Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.”
— Quentin Crisp
67. “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.”
— Quentin Crisp
68. “I don’t hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.”
— Quentin Crisp
69. “In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.”
— Quentin Crisp
70. “Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.”
— Quentin Crisp
71. “My function in life was to render clear what was already blindingly conspicuous.”
— Quentin Crisp
72. “The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.”
— Quentin Crisp
73. “Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically – for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist – but then what isn t?”
— Quentin Crisp
74. “Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone – but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.”
— Quentin Crisp
75. “Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.”
— Quentin Crisp
76. “The continued propinquity of another human being cramps the style after a time unless that person is somebody you think you love. Then the burden becomes intolerable at once.”
— Quentin Crisp
77. “Flowers are words even a baby can understand.”
— Quentin Crisp
78. “Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.”
— Quentin Crisp
79. “You first have to find who you are. Then, you have to be it like mad.”
— Quentin Crisp
80. “Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.”
— Quentin Crisp
81. “If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.”
— Quentin Crisp
82. “If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.”
— Quentin Crisp
83. “To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.”
— Quentin Crisp
84. “The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.”
— Quentin Crisp
85. “A gentleman doesn’t pounce he glides. If a woman sits on a piece of furniture which permits your sitting beside her, you are free to regard this as an invitation, though not an unequivocal one.”
— Quentin Crisp
86. “The trouble with children is that they’re not returnable.”
— Quentin Crisp
87. “This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there.”
— Quentin Crisp
88. “Whatever has gone on in the outer world has passed me by. But I think if anyone said to me, ‘if you go on like this life will pass you by,’ I would reply, ’thank God for that, I nearly got mixed up in the beastly thing.”
— Quentin Crisp
89. “In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!”
— Quentin Crisp
90. “Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.”
— Quentin Crisp
91. “Mr Melly had to be obscene to be believed.”
— Quentin Crisp
92. “An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.”
— Quentin Crisp
93. “The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.”
— Quentin Crisp
94. “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.”
— Quentin Crisp
95. “Men get laid, but women get screwed.”
— Quentin Crisp
96. “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.”
— Quentin Crisp
97. “I recommend limiting one’s involvement in other people’s lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.”
— Quentin Crisp
98. “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.”
— Quentin Crisp
99. “Other-cheekism is not only a way of purifying the soul, it is also part of every weak person’s survival kit.”
— Quentin Crisp
100. “People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.”
— Quentin Crisp
