10 Quentin Crisp Quotes from an Englishman in New York

Born on Christmas Day in Sutton South London and christened Denis Charles Pratt, Quentin Crisp was an author and raconteur who is probably best known for his outlandishly decadent style and of course his novel The Naked Civil Servant. A lover of make up from a very young age Crisp worked as a rent boy for several years before becoming a life model for artists in art colleges across the capital.

Crisp was famous for his refusal to do any housework whatsoever saying “After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse” and would continue writing and raconteuring with his novel The Naked Civil Servant being his most successful tome. Moving to the States in 1981 he continued to experience shock and hatred for the way he lived and expressed himself so much so that after a dinner with Crisp Sting would dedicate a song to him and here we have 10 Quentin Crisp Quotes from an Englishman in New York.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

I recommend limiting one’s involvement in other people’s lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.

The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.

Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?

The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper.

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.

When talking to Sting during their dinner Quentin remarked jokingly “that he looked forward to receiving his naturalisation papers so that he could commit a crime and not be deported.”

It obviously worked as Quentin remained in the States and even after his death in Manchester England at the age of 90 from a heart attack fulfilling humorous pact he had made with Penny Arcade to live to be a century old, with a decade off for good behaviour he had his ashes flown back to the Big Apple where he was interred.