Quote

I have a bit of a struggle with some aspects of or forms of Buddhism, but Zen I find to be mainly congenial.

Quentin S. Crisp

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Quentin S. Crisp
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Writer
Devonshire
Form
Congenial
Find
Mainly
Aspects
Buddhism
Forms
Aspect
Struggle
Bits

More quotes by Quentin S. Crisp

Image
When I think back on it, I have a sense of relaxation, as if in the seventies no one had to try to be anyone other than who they were. I'm sure that's not really true, but that's how I remember it, and I suppose it might be relatively true.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
I think the natural is, for many people, the gateway to something supernatural or otherworldly.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
The imagination is fertile. From seeds of the imagination, much is made manifest.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
Lots of things were there [in the seventies], in the social experience, but not quite named, lurking like a stranger on the edge of the playground.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
Some Buddhists, however, never seem to get past the void, and I suppose I view this as a kind of Buddhist 'Old Testament' that I don't especially like.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
This is the strange thing about existing in time. As [Philip] Larkin puts it, truly, though our element is time, we are not used to the strange perspectives open at each moment of our lives - something like that.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
There's a strong aspect of Buddhism which is geared towards ending all fertility.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
I feel that Nagai Kafu was a writer who cold stitch together apparently meaningless moments like these into a lyrical whole, and has enhanced my ability to do the same with my own life.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
I do have a muse. I am not sure how to describe her. She can be very elusive. She was born in England but has Mediterranean ancestry.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
I have a sense of them being Easter religions, for some reason. Christianity, of course, is a mystery religion, too, and I believe that Arthur Machen was one of those especially interested in the link between the pagan mysteries and the Christian ones. So, my experience was also a Machenesque experience.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
I'm more a dog person than a cat person.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
The peculiar thing is that, in focusing only on the here and now, Buddhism seems to despise the world.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
We all know about the car breaking down on a deserted road scenario. That's cliché. I'm thinking more of Cider with Rosie, as in, the dark side.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
[My muse] is, in fact, a woman of the world, and precisely because of this, hopes that a diversity of cultures will endure, and that one bland monoculture does not swamp everything.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
I suppose what I can say is that I do feel I have a natural spiritual sensibility.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
More or less the first thing that comes into my head is that some people are always looking for what they want to do in life and never finding it. I'm not one of those people. It has been very obvious to me from an early age who I am, and this has been tied up with creativity, and, specifically, with writing.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
Another part of the rejection I mention was the realisation that Buddhism quite simply ignores or dismisses a whole hemisphere of human experience that finds expression in and is enshrined by the mystery religions.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
Zen, on the other hand, is not so dogmatically sterile, though there are certainly traces and more than traces of this austerity. However, with Zen we have not only the void, but the fertile void. The ink lines in a sumi-e painting show this fertility of the void ever ready to brim over into existence.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
[Someone] said that what I described as the Buddhist voice - the life-denying voice of censure and guilt - sounded to him very much like a Catholic voice. This is, indeed, a mystery, and it intrigues me, too.
Quentin S. Crisp