I. Frost's Selected Quotations

Everything at Amazon by and about: Quentin Crisp

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

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

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

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

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?

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

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

The message that 'love' will solve all of our problems is repeated incessantly in contemporary culture - like a philosophical tom tom. It would be closer to the truth to say that love is a contagious and virulent disease which leaves a victim in a state of near imbecility, paralysis, profound melancholia and sometimes culminates in death.

Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it."

Manners are love in a cool climate.

The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.

Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: ''If you truly love me, kill the bartender.''

Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

Life is a game in which the rules are constantly changing; nothing spoils a game more than those who take it seriously. Adultery? Phooey! You should never subjugate yourself to another nor seek the subjugation of someone else to yourself. If you follow that Crispian principle you will be able to say ''Phooey,'' too, instead of reaching for your gun when you fancy yourself betrayed."

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?''

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.

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.

Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.

If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.

Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.

This school was on top of a hill so that God could see everything that went on. It looked like a cross between a prison and a church and it was.

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.

Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.

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.

This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

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.

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?

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.

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.

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.

However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as ''Soho'' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

Tears were to me what glass beads are to African traders

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough.

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

I learned very early in life that I was always going to need people more than they needed me"

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

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

My function in life was to render clear what was already blindingly conspicuous.

A gentleman doesn't pounce he glides. If a woman sits on a piece of furniture which permits your sitting beside her, you are free to regard this as an invitation, though not an unequivocal one.

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.

Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigour. With such people the grey head is but the impression of the old fellow's hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.

"Euphemisms are not, as many young people think, useless verbiage for that which can and should be said bluntly; they are like secret agents on a delicate mission, they must airily pass by a stinking mess with barely so much as a nod of the head, make their point of constructive criticism and continue on in calm forbearance. Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne."