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Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.

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
Humor
Getting
Without
Way
Swine
Appearing
Manners
Absolutes
Absolute

More quotes by Quentin Crisp

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I am the last of Britain's stately homos.
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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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Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
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I don't think I have a tragic demeanor.
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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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Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.
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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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The Scots are very hospitable almost as hospitable as the Americans.
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The programs constantly repeat themselves and one another. No one has yet had the nerve to say, 'As we have nothing sensible to tell you between now and 8:30, please tune in again then.
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Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.
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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 recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.
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The Americans, of course, are quite dotty with hospitality.
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Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
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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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Men get laid, but women get screwed.
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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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Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.
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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 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?
Quentin Crisp