Quentin Crisp

Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette.

Life is a game in which the rules are constantly changing nothing spoils a game more than those who take it seriously.

Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

The continued propinquity of another human being cramps the style after a time unless that person is somebody you think you love. Then the burden becomes intolerable at once.

One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.

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.

Even holligans marry, though they know that marriage is but for a little while. It is alimony that is forever.

Decency...must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation to which the filing system has been lost?

I never work. Work does age you so.

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

Marriage is but for a little while. It is alimony that is forever.

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?

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.

The trouble with children is that they are not returnable.

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.

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.

For flavor, Instant Sex will never supersede the stuff you had to peel and cook.

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.

Life is the funny thing that happens to you on the way to the grave.

If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.

FASHION IS WHAT YOU ADOPT WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

NEVER TRY TO KEEP UP WITH THE JONESES. DRAG THEM DOWN TO YOUR LEVEL. IT’S CHEAPER.

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

In the days when I went to work, I never once knew what I was doing. These days, I never work. Work does age one so.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing.

There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.

Ignore it: you never stop speaking; why stop writing?

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 of what to do with the long winter evenings.

T HE BEST ADVICE on writing I’ve ever received: Miss Stein said, “The way to say it is to say it.”

No one who intends to take up writing as a career should read any work that lies in the category in which his own efforts would be placed. If he disobeys this rule, he will almost certainly feel he must write literature instead of trying to say what he means.

Bow down before them. They know what they are doing.