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Atheism
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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?
-Quentin Crisp
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Attachment
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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
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Authors & Writing
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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
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Character
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Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
-Quentin Crisp
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Control
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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
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However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
-Quentin Crisp
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Deception/Lying
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Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically -- for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist -- but then what isn t?
-Quentin Crisp
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Desires
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Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.
-Quentin Crisp
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Exile
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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
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Family
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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.
-Quentin Crisp
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Fanaticism
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This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there.
-Quentin Crisp
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Identity
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The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
-Quentin Crisp
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Infidelity
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Life is a game in which the rules are constantly changing; nothing spoils a game more than those who take it seriously. Adultery? Phooey! You should never subjugate yourself to another nor seek the subjugation of someone else to yourself. If you follow that Crispian principle you will be able to say Phooey, too, instead of reaching for your gun when you fancy yourself betrayed.
-Quentin Crisp
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Knowledge
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To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
-Quentin Crisp
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Law
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The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
-Quentin Crisp
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Legacy
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An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
-Quentin Crisp
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Life
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Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
-Quentin Crisp
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Love
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Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
-Quentin Crisp
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Manners
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Manners are love in a cool climate.
-Quentin Crisp
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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
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Marriage
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Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
-Quentin Crisp
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Men
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Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.
-Quentin Crisp
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Men & Women
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Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
-Quentin Crisp
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Neighbors
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Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.
-Quentin Crisp
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Parenting
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My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
-Quentin Crisp
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Books by and about Quentin Crisp