Quentin Crisp

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs are your style.”

“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.”

“The stately homes of England are places where you are expected to admire the ancestors of the people who are now passing you the soup.”

“The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.”

“My function in life is not to be a politician, but to be one of the people who are puzzled by the politicians.”

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

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

“To my friends, I'm a staunch Tory; to my enemies, I'm a flaming queen.”

“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?'”

“Style is the art of getting away with it.”

“A gentleman is a man who never gives offense unintentionally.”