Quentin Crisp

“Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.”

“Manners are love in a cool climate.”

“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.”

“Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.”

“Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art...I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.”

“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.”

“Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.”

“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.”

“You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.”

“The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call “the trouble with you.” Nevertheless, the journey is worth making.”

“There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.”

“Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.”

“Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.”

“My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.”

“For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.”

“The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.”