Politics is the art of making the inevitable appear to be the matter of wise human choice.
—Quentin Crisp
If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.
—Quentin Crisp
Topics: Success
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
Topics: Prejudice
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
—Quentin Crisp
Topics: Men & Women
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
Topics: Attachment
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
Topics: Youth
Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
—Quentin Crisp
Topics: Respect, Respectability
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
Topics: Exile
Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.
—Quentin Crisp
Topics: Desire, Desires
Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
—Quentin Crisp
Topics: Life, Living
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
Topics: Manners
Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
—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
Topics: Opinions, Existence, Identity
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
Topics: Relationships
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
Topics: Relationships
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
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
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
Topics: Control
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