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In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.

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
Possibly
Potential
Unemployable
Surface
Inattentive
Actor
Waiter
Stage
Unemployed
Actors
Manhattan
Every
Flat
Flats

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I can't remember ever having a tragic demeanor. Although my life was tragedy.
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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.
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No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
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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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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 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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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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My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
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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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I would never go to a place and live there because the weather was good or the scenery was beautiful or the architecture was wonderful. I would only go because the people are kind, and in America, everybody's your friend and happiness rains down from the sky.
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Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically - for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist - but then what isn't?
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An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
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To live in the past is to miss today's opportunities and tomorrow's blessings.
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To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
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God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen. It had become obvious that he was never going to do a thing I said.
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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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Manners are love in a cool climate.
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That's the only sense in which I've been lucky: I have the kind of face to which cosmetics could be applied.
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Never get involved with someone who wants to change you
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Los Angeles is just New York lying down.
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