Quentin Crisp

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.

The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.

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

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

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.

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.

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

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.

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

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

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.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.

Abatement in the hostility of one's enemies must never be thought to signify they have been won over. It only means that one has ceased to constitute a threat.

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

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.

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

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

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

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.