Frasi di Quentin Crisp

“Avevo offerto un letto a quattro persone senza che fossero state invitate. Tutto in America è un enorme paravento.”

“Esistono tre motivi per diventare scrittore: il primo è che vi servono i soldi; il secondo, che avete qualcosa da dire che il mondo dovrebbe sapere; il terzo, e che proprio non sapete cosa fare nelle lunghe sere d'estate.”

“Gli inglesi non si aspettano la felicità. Ho avuto l'impressione per il periodo che sono stato là, che essi non aspirano ad essere felici, ma giusti.”

“I giovani hanno sempre il medesimo problema: come riuscire a ribellarsi e a conformarsi allo stesso tempo. Adesso lo hanno risolto ribellandosi ai genitori e copiandosi a vicenda.”

“Il mondo intero non è forse una vasta casa d'appuntamenti il cui sistema d'archiviazione è andato perduto?”

“La guerra fra i sessi è l'unico tipo di guerra in cui i nemici dormono regolarmente insieme.”

“La vita era una cosa divertente che mi capitò sulla strada della tomba.”

“Le leggi sono semplici espedienti che indossano lunghi abiti bianchi.”

“Mai tenersi alla pari dei tizi qualunque. Abbassateli al vostro livello.”

“Questa donna non vola da un estremo all'altro, ma vive qui.”

“Un'autobiografia è un necrologio in forma periodica a cui manca l'ultima puntata.”

“Una conversazione non vola via con un drink, ma vi affoga.”

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

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

“The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It's not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it's the resentment that settles on your face”

“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.”

“In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.”

“However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.”

“I now know that if you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist.”

“You'll never be wanted," [a draft board official] said, and thrust at me a smaller piece of paper. This described me as being incapable of being graded in grades A, B, etc., because I suffered from sexual perversion. When the story of my disgrace became one of the contemporary fables of Chelsea, a certain Miss Marshall said, "I don't much care for the expression 'suffering from.' Shouldn't it be 'glorying in'?”

“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?”

“The young always have the same problem — how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this problem by defying their elders and copying each other.”

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

“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.”

“Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper.”

“If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.”

“The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.”

“Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.”

“It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.”

“I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.”

“There are girls who do not like real life… Some of these girls are innocent enough to think that these unreal friendships [with homosexuals] will lead to true love — a kind of sexual intercourse that will happen to them without their having to take too horribly much notice. Even those who are sufficiently sophisticated to know that this will not be so persist in these relationships. They provide an opportunity to lavish emotion on a pseudo-man without paying the price that in heterosexual circumstances would be inevitable.”

“All liaisons between homosexuals are conducted as though they were between a chorus girl and a bishop. In some cases both parties think they are bishops.”

“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.”

“He explained to me that he wanted a simple boy-meets-girl story with lyrics. This I felt was quite beyond my capabilities. I did not know any boys who met girls.”

“I became one of the stately homos of England.”

“Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.”

“As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, "they can’t leave anything alone."”

“It would be impossible to get through the kind of life that I have known without accumulating a vast unused stockpile of rage. Retaliation, though, was a luxury I could never afford. On the physical level I was too feeble. On any other I was not rich enough. I never dared to be rude to anyone. I never knew that I might not need him later. Long after fantasies of sexual excess had ceased to torment me, my imagination was inflamed by lurid day-dreams of having my revenge on the world.”

“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."”

“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.”

“You talk for talking’s sake,' she hissed. I asked if that was bad. 'I mean it,' the girl replied. 'You talk for talking’s sake.' I had heard her the first time and had understood the words but not the contempt with which they were charged. 'Would you be equally annoyed,' I asked, 'if I danced for dancing’s sake? […] I should have said, 'Would you hate me if I lived for living’s sake?' This would have been the total question — the one to which a full reply could have saved the world.”