65 Motivational Quentin Crisp Quotes on Success in Life

Quentin Crisp was an English writer, raconteur, and actor. From a conventional suburban background, Crisp wore make-up and painted his nails. During his teenage years, he worked briefly as a rent-boy. He then spent 30 years as a professional model for life-classes in art colleges. This motivational Quentin Crisp Quotes will motivate you.

Best Quentin Crisp Quotes

1. 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
2. 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
3. Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are. ~ 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. Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. ~ Quentin Crisp

6. You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality. ~ Quentin Crisp
7. 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 Quotes
8. Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can’t help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. And they don’t like that. That’s the famous joke: I don’t like peas, and I’m glad I don’t like them because if I liked them I would eat them and I hate them. ~ 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. 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

11. To live in the past is to miss today’s opportunities and tomorrow’s blessings. ~ Quentin Crisp

12. 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
13. Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave. ~ Quentin Crisp
14. 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

15. Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne. ~ Quentin Crisp

16. Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then? ~ Quentin Crisp
17. No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else. ~ Quentin Crisp Quotes
18. It may be true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance, but it’s also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts. ~ Quentin Crisp
19. 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
20. Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses. ~ Quentin Crisp
21. If at first, you don’t succeed, failure may be your style. ~ Quentin Crisp
22. The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it ~ Quentin Crisp
23. 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
24. 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

25. It’s been agony but I couldn’t have done it any other way. ~ Quentin Crisp

26. 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
27. You will survive if you believe in yourself. ~ Quentin Crisp
28. When asked, ‘Shall I tell my mother I’m gay?’, I reply, ‘Never tell your mother anything. ~ Quentin Crisp
29. The trouble with children is that they’re not returnable. ~ Quentin Crisp
30. Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine. ~ Quentin Crisp
31. Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who…have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies. ~ Quentin Crisp Quotes
32. You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. ~ Quentin Crisp
33. 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
34. The more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches. ~ Quentin Crisp
35. However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police. ~ Quentin Crisp

36. If you truly love me, kill the bartender. ~ Quentin Crisp

37. 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. ~ Quentin Crisp
38. 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
39. 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
40. The … problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a “real” man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who “goes with” other men is not what they would call a real man. The conundrum is incapable of resolution, but that does not make homosexuals give it up. ~ Quentin Crisp
41. 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
42. When I was young, I and the whole world thought that all homosexuals were effeminate. And of course they’re not. You can just see which people are effeminate; that’s the only difference. So, I became a prototype of the effeminate man, because I was conspicuously effeminate. But camp is not something I do, it’s something I am. ~ Quentin Crisp

43. Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. ~ Quentin Crisp

44. 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
45. To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody. ~ Quentin Crisp
46. If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable. ~ Quentin Crisp
47. 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
48. If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man’s soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left. ~ Quentin Crisp

49. Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you. ~ Quentin Crisp

50. When I was young, we thought that Oscar Wilde was a great nobleman who had thrown his life away for love. Nothing could be less true. He slept with East Enders who were procured for him by Lord Alfred Douglas. He knew them only ‘in Braille’ – the curtains were never drawn back in the rooms in Oxford where he met those boys. It was the most sordid life you can imagine. And he was bleating about love and dragging the fair name of Mr. Plato into the trial – after a life like that? ~ Quentin Crisp
51. 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
52. “I never spend my time doing anything I’ll have to do again tomorrow.” ~ Quentin Crisp
53. “Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.” ~ Quentin Crisp Quotes
54. “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

55. “I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.” ~ Quentin Crisp

56. “It’s a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.” ~ Quentin Crisp
57. “If you don’t stay in some days, you can’t recharge your batteries.” ~ Quentin Crisp
58. “In England, nobody’s your friend.” ~ Quentin Crisp
59. “One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.” ~ Quentin Crisp
60. “Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.” ~ Quentin Crisp

61. “Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.” ~ Quentin Crisp

62. “Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?” ~ Quentin Crisp
63. “People say to me, “When did you come out?” But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I’d found in an attic, saying, “I am a beautiful princess!” What my parents thought of this, I don’t know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.” ~ Quentin Crisp
64. “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
65. “The measure of woman’s distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr’s crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.” ~ Quentin Crisp

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