Quentin Crisp (born Denis Charles Pratt; (1908-12-25)25 December 1908 – (1999-11-21)21 November 1999) was an English writer, raconteur and actor.
I am a stereotype. I am an effeminate man.
I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.
The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, "I wish you hadn't made every line funny. It's so depressing. "
Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.
To lose is not always failure.
I came first to America in 1977 at the invitation of a man who wanted to make my life story into a musical. But my agent said it was not to be and it was never done. So I went back, but I'd seen New York, and I wanted to live there. Because everybody talks to you in the street. See, nobody talks to you in England.
To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.
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.
Any film is at least better than real life.
Everybody who's been on television more than once wears in public an expression of fatuous affability. Because you may be addressed at any moment by somebody.
I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.
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?
The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze.
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.
Europeans have quarrelled since the beginning of time.
It's a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.
Every day someone notices me and waves to me, or stops and speaks to me, or asks me for an autograph, or photographs me.
America believes in freedom. The English don't believe in it. They don't believe in happiness.
What better proof of love can there be than money? A ten-shilling note shows incontrovertibly just how mad about you a man is.