You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. – Quentin Crisp
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. – Quentin Crisp
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
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. – Quentin Crisp
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. – Quentin Crisp
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
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? – 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. – Quentin Crisp
Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps. – Quentin Crisp
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
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
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost? – Quentin Crisp
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
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
There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse. – Quentin Crisp
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
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