Google
|
The quotations are arranged by author name.
Current counts: Authors: 8,146. Quotations: 38,970
Select the first character of the author's last name that you want to look at:
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
|
| Quentin Crisp
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. A pinch of notoriety will do. An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing. Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep. Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne. Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are. Flowers are words which even a baby can understand. For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change. For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook. Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors. However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police. I am not famous; I am notorious and if I am rich it is because I have taken my wages in people. I am one of the stately homos of old England. I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned. I have always lived my life in the profession of being. I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. 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. If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style. If I were asked to describe the difference between the sexes in the gay world, I would say that the men wanted to be amused; the girls sought vindication. 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. 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. Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation to which the filing system has been lost? 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. It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom. It's no good running a pig farm badly for thirty years while saying, "Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer." By then, pigs will be your style. Life was a funny thing that occurred on the way to the grave. Los angeles is just New York lying down. Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone- but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding. Manners are love in a cool climate. Marriage is but for a little while. It is alimony that is forever. Men get laid, but women get screwed. Mr. Crisp thanks the world for letting him stay so long. My function in life was to render clear what was already blindingly conspicuous. My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it. Never get involved with someone who wants to change you. Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper. Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress. 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. Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh. 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? One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend. Sex is the last refuge of the miserable. 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. The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity. 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. The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress. 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. The trouble with children is that they're 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. The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy. The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen. 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. There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings. There is no need to do any housework at all. after the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse. This school was on top of a hill so that God could see everything that went on. It looked like a cross between a prison and a church and it was. This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there. Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses. To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody. Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster. Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps. When asked, "Should I tell my mother I'm gay?" I answer, "Never tell your mother anything." 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? Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making. You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. |
|
Sports Quotations.
Show Business Quotations.
|