All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading, but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth.

— Quentin Crisp

Ask yourself if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?

— Quentin Crisp

Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. 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.

— Quentin Crisp

If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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

— Quentin Crisp

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.

— Quentin Crisp

Manners are love in a cool climate.

— Quentin Crisp