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

Crisp, Quentin on Desire
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Etiquette
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"This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there."

Crisp, Quentin on Extremes and Extremists
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Family
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"Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?"

Crisp, Quentin on Flirting
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Involvement
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"To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody."

Crisp, Quentin on Knowledge
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"The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress."

Crisp, Quentin on Law and Lawyers
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"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?"

Crisp, Quentin on Lies and Lying
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"Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave."

Crisp, Quentin on Life and Living
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"Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it."

Crisp, Quentin on Living Together
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Love
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"Manners are love in a cool climate."

Crisp, Quentin on Manners
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Men
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Neighbors
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Outcasts
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"My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it."

Crisp, Quentin on Parents and Parenting
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"However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police."

Crisp, Quentin on Police
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"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?"

Crisp, Quentin on Atheism
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"An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing."

Crisp, Quentin on Autobiography
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Poverty and The Poor
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Prejudice
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Relationships
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"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."

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

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

Crisp, Quentin on Rewards
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Seduction
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Self-image
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"Sex is the last refuge of the miserable."

Crisp, Quentin on Sex
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"Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses."

Crisp, Quentin on Character
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Tact and Tactfulness
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Writers and Writing
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Youth
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Adultery
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"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."

Crisp, Quentin on Control
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"Few are more sad than the person who reaches the end of their life and says'I never really did anything I wanted to do'."

Crisp, Quentin on
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