Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.

- Quentin Crisp

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

- Quentin Crisp

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

- Quentin Crisp

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.

- Quentin Crisp

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

- Quentin Crisp

Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.

- Quentin Crisp

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

- Quentin Crisp

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.

- Quentin Crisp

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.

- Quentin Crisp

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

- Quentin Crisp

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

- Quentin Crisp

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

- Quentin Crisp

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

- Quentin Crisp

Manners are love in a cool climate.

- Quentin Crisp

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

- Quentin Crisp

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

- Quentin Crisp

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.

- Quentin Crisp

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

- Quentin Crisp

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

- Quentin Crisp

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.

- Quentin Crisp