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Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

Quentin Crisp

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Quentin Crisp
Age: 90 †
Born: 1908
Born: December 25
Died: 1999
Died: November 21
Actor
Autobiographer
Film Actor
Graphic Designer
Model
Socialite
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Writer
Sutton
London
Daniel Pratt
Denis Charles Pratt
Truth
Cologne
Euphemism
Diplomatic
Unpleasant
Truths
Wearing
Communication
Language
Euphemisms

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You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.
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Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
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I've never not been famous.
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It is true that in America I've become a national hero, but really I was a hopeless case, that was all.
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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.
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To live in the past is to miss today's opportunities and tomorrow's blessings.
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It may be true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance, but it's also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts.
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It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.
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Vice is its own reward.
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Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.
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Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
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The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
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Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
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I have to realise that as I am only English and am allowed to live in America, I have to give something in return. And since I cannot build a hospital, or endow a university, I can only give my infinite availability.
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I can't remember ever having a tragic demeanor. Although my life was tragedy.
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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
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The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
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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.
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You can behave as badly as you like in America. Nobody notices.
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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.
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