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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.

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
Age
Decline
Hamlet
Enough
Aesthetic
Invitation
Years
Youth
Grounds
Make
Room
Posture
Rooms
Invitations
Philistine
Started
Monstrous
Postures
Knew
Bold
Philistines
Middle
Shed
Affectation

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I've never not been famous.
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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.
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You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
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I had a friend who had two degrees of being made up: when invited I would say 'Can I make up?' and he would say 'Oh yes - tinted?', or he would say, 'Oh yes - clotted?'
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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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This woman did not fly to extremes she lived there.
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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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When I was young, I and the whole world thought that all homosexuals were effeminate. And of course they're not. You can just see which people are effeminate that's the only difference. So, I became a prototype of the effeminate man, because I was conspicuously effeminate. But camp is not something I do, it's something I am.
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If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.
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Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.
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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.
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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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I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do?
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Fear and hatred do not seem to find expression in tears.
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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.
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I don't really act. I say the words the way I would say them if I meant them.
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I've always lived in the same way.
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In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
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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.
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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.
Quentin Crisp