Quotes by Quentin Crisp

It's interesting, the sense of pastoral utopia that exists in so much fantasy -- in Edward Dunsany, John R.R. Tolkien and so on.

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.

The imagination is fertile. From seeds of the imagination, much is made manifest.

There's a strong aspect of Buddhism which is geared towards ending all fertility.

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.

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.

To me the seventies represent normality, and, of course, it is a normality that is now anachronistic.

I seem to be less depressed but also less hopeful now in my thirties. My widow's peak bothers me. I think a lot about the end of the human race. And so on.

I do not think that my spiritual apprehensions are as dogmatically cultural as those of many people who have been brought up strictly in a particular tradition.

I grew up in North Devon, by the sea, and feel a special affinity for the landscape there, despite a lack of actual ancestry.

I went on a meditation retreat. In 10 or so days, I spent about a hundred hours meditating, observing 'noble silence' the whole time, and so on. This was an interesting experience, which has had some beneficial effects for me.

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.

I associate my childhood with two things, mainly: the North Devon countryside and a sense of connection to another world.

You might call this innocence. I had a sense of another world that had not been spoken of to me.

This is part of the fundamental character of Buddhism that I find problematic -- that it is not interested in anything. Hence the 'Fascination' in the title of the essay, the fascination of art and creativity, stands in opposition to what is called 'Liberation'.

I was born in the seventies, age of bad haircuts and grainy colour photos.

I understand that words can mean different things to different people, and, further, that people can have different relationships with complex abstract entities such as Buddhism. To me, anyway, the entity in my life that conflicts with my creativity is Buddhism.

I think the natural is, for many people, the gateway to something supernatural or otherworldly.

The peculiar thing is that, in focusing only on the here and now, Buddhism seems to despise the world.

You focus on the here and now in order to escape existence forever and vanish into Nirvana. There is another religious impulse that is the opposite of this. It uses a world elsewhere in order to affirm life and give a reason to go forth and multiply.

If we do overcome linear time, I would hope this means dwelling more directly in the fertility of the imagination rather than denying it, as some aspects of Buddhism seem to.

I really think William Burroughs was onto something here, when he said, Dreams are a biologic necessity and your lifeline into space.

I'm not sure if there is a cultural loss of innocence specifically associated with the seventies. The oil crisis? The Watergate scandal? I really don't know. There's nothing there on the scale of Hiroshima.

I was in just the right generation to have taken feminism seriously by osmosis -- also the generation when the breakdown of the family really began and for whom The Smiths were something new and essential.

It's true that Eastern philosophy and religion were not unknown to me as a child, since my father has explored much in that area, and written books more or less in that area, too.

I did not understand the differences between Catholic and Protestant until I was an adult.

There can be no such thing as philosophical horror, at least as a premeditated genre. Why? Because philosophy implies enquiry, reflection and an open mind, whereas the genre of horror demands certain conclusions in advance.

Anyway, to cut off one's biological dreams seems to me the most fundamental form of psychic castration that you could imagine.

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.

I mean, in 1979 I was seven. I do remember punk, though, as a playground phenomenon, and remember that it was exciting to us. It really was, to a five- or six-year-old, quite a thrilling enticement to revolt. The anarchy sign scratched in desk tops, and so on.

I'm constantly struggling with the futility and even sinfulness, from an antinatalist point of view, of creativity. And that struggle itself seems part of the creativity, though I sometimes suspect that it's nothing but a burden and an obstacle.

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.

If we do want to do that colonise space to survive,, then vacuous materialism is not going to be enough for us.

I seemed to recall some words from an old Zen master, something like, My Zen cuts down mountains. My rejection of Buddhism was a cutting down of mountains; that is precisely how it felt to me.

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.

1977 was also, of course, the year that Derek Jarman made his iconoclastic film Jubilee, which was so much part of the punk movement.

It would be hard to say that exactly, but antinatalism is a reality in my life, not just an interesting idea. I can feel it in the chilled and weary marrow of my bones.

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.

The research reading I did for Fascination and Liberation included some Jung, and I noticed that he had a similar impression of Buddhism to myself, that, if it weren't for certain qualifying clauses, the philosophy would be downright suicidal.

Speaking of Philip Larkin, in his poem about the First World War he wrote something like, Never such innocence, before or since, that turned itself to past without a word.

We're all more or less interested in the 'swinging sixties', of course, but that's not what I mean. I'm interested in the particular naive glamour that clings to the post-war and pre-Hendrix era.

I'm not claiming anything like sainthood -- merely a native perception.

William Burroughs, incidentally, took up the slogan that we are Here to go, which contradicts the tendency in Eastern mysticism to advocate staying where you are because there's nowhere to go anyway. I feel conflicted on this one.

I grew up with tarot cards and the reading of tea leaves.

The weird thing is, I'm not entirely sure that I am meant to think that such a gift is who I am according to the philosophy underlying Vedanta. But I have long been stubborn like that, for some reason. It's a gift, as I say.

I feel like the seventies was a decade where things ran out, and where other things set in. There was just a lurking graininess and seediness about the decade, a slight grogginess of the hangover from the sixties.

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 Catholics or the God of the protestants in whom you don't believe?

Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is but for a little while. It is alimony that is forever.

The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it.

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.

Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.

As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, they can't leave anything alone.

If you don't stay in some days, you can't recharge your batteries.

In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!

Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.

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

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.

Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going.

The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

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?'

I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!

Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.

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.

I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.

Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.

What I wanted most of all was to use sex as a weapon to allure, subjugate, and, if possible, destroy the personality of others.

I have to realise that as I am only English and am allowed to live in America, I have to give something in return. And since I cannot build a hospital, or endow a university, I can only give my infinite availability.

I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

I read all the books I could find about manners, and the extraordinary thing was, in all books up to the end of the Second World War, most were directed at how to comport yourself in the presence of the ladies.

The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds is just so unlikely I can't go along with it.

Women have decided to be people, which is a great mistake. Women were nicer than people.

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.

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

The more people one has to love, the more one's capacity to love stretches.

To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

Nearly always when actors are approached by the beauticians, they try to avoid the dabs that the beauticians put on their faces. They dodge them.

The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.

Did you know that Allah promises you a seat in Paradise if you kill a Christian?

It's a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.