Quentin Crisp (born Denis Charles Pratt; (1908-12-25)25 December 1908 – (1999-11-21)21 November 1999) was an English writer, raconteur and actor.
Nowadays people don't use face powder; they say it dries the skin. But I makeup in the old-fashioned way.
Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained. If you have no personality, you may be able to save your face and, possibly, your entire anatomy by following the current fashion, but all we shall know about you, when we see you coming down the street, is that you had enough money to buy a glossy magazine and were sufficiently cunning to work out the cut of the garments shown therein.
For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.
I have to realise that as I am only English and am allowed to live in America, I have to give something in return. And since I cannot build a hospital, or endow a university, I can only give my infinite availability.
Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going.
In Manhattan, when you're out of the front door, you're on, and you have to be ready to smile and speak to people.
Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east.
You can behave as badly as you like in America. Nobody notices.
The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, "I wish you hadn't made every line funny. It's so depressing. "
You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.
It's written into the Constitution that you're allowed to pursue happiness. In England it would be considered a frivolous objective.
If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.
You can't be a person and a lady. If you're a person, you can open the damned door yourself.
However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.
Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.
All America is much the same.
The message that 'love' will solve all of our problems is repeated incessantly in contemporary culture - like a philosophical tom tom. It would be closer to the truth to say that love is a contagious and virulent disease which leaves a victim in a state of near imbecility, paralysis, profound melancholia, and sometimes culminates in death.