Frasi di Quentin Crisp

pagina 2

“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.”

“I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to "Hamlet" on the grounds that I knew who won.”

“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.”

“God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen. It had become obvious that he was never going to do a thing I said.”

“If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.”

“A pinch of notoriety will do.”

“I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.”

“I have come to think that both sex and politics are a mistake and that any attempt to establish a connection between the two is the greatest error of all.”

“To minimize my guilt at going to the pictures — to call this wanton pursuit of an effete pleasure by another name — I needed movie companions as drunkards need drinking partners. If I entered a cinema alone, God might plunge his arm through the roof of the auditorium booming in a stereophonic voice, "And you, Crisp, what are you doing here?" I would never have dared reply, "I’m just enjoying myself, Lord." I remembered too well what happened to Mr and Mrs Adam. A commissionaire with a flaming sword came and asked them to leave.”

“Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH.”

“The low dive had set a standard that only middle-aged hooligans could remember and to which they looked back as Mrs Lot at Sodom.”

“When stripped, I looked less like "Il David" than a plucked chicken that died of myxomatosis.”

“The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn’t even want the beastly thing.”

“When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I lived in Clerkenwell that the only complete solution to my problems was suicide. I never brought it off. I was afraid… Hopelessness was thinly spread like a drizzle over my whole outlook. But, in an emergency, I could not find a puddle of despondency deep enough to drown in.”

“An autobiography is obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.”

“Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbours.”

“Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.”

“The proprietor had hair so red that pigmentation had flowed out into every visible inch of his skin and even into the pinks of his eyes, as the colour of flowering cherry trees stains their leaves.”

“The rest of the world in which I lived was still stumbling about in search of a weapon with which to exterminate this monster [homosexuality] whose shape and size were not yet known or even guessed at. It was thought to be Greek in origin, smaller than socialism but more deadly, especially to children.”

“I acquiesced in this on the grounds that the most anyone can expect from a holiday is a change of agony.”

“Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality.”

“Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.”

“The measure of woman’s distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr’s crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.”

“I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.”

“Many [hooligans] discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots and, greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope. The fathers superior of the order do not try to influence their children in Satan; they merely shake their heads in sorrow. They know that the apostate must work out his own damnation.”

“Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he…" This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him."”

“To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.”

“[To read a novel or see a play was to drink life through a straw — to smoke it through a filter-tip. If we were not afraid of blackening our teeth or riddling our lungs with cancer — if we were a dauntless race of men with strong digestions — we would be able to devour life without the aid of these over-civilized devices.”

“Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.”

“I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!”