Quentin Crisp

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?"

Fashion is for people who don't know who they are.

Life was a funny thing that occured on the way to the grave.

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.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

Flowers are words even a baby can understand.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

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

Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.

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

For flavor, instant sex will never supercede the stuff you have to peel and cook.

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

The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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