Quentin Crisp
Quentin Crisp
Quentin Crisp25 December 1908 – 21 November 1999) was an English writer and raconteur...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth25 December 1908
inspirational-life want world
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.
mean hands ifs
If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.
love life relationship
You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
regret doubt looks
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.
happiness effort enormous
No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
forgiveness hilarious thinking
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.
fashion style able
Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.
writing realist ifs
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.
inspirational levels dignity
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
sad fashion being-yourself
Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
gay thinking proud
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.
children trouble
The trouble with children is that they are not returnable
english sincerity
The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity
clown country evening facts loathe love rejection speaks truth whipped
It is not a biopic; it is not a trawl through the facts of somebody's life. It is more an evening with a Shakespearean clown who speaks the truth and was whipped for his pains. Writing the play made me love and loathe my country more: love it that it could create, and has always created, one-offs like Quentin; loathe it for its rejection of him.