Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.
Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
The flagrantly gay Quentin Crisp dealt with homophobic bullying by refusing to bow to its onslaught. His number listed in the phone directory, he responded to derogatory remarks accompanied with a stated intent to kill him by asking, “Would you like to make an appointment?”
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
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.
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.
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person.
Abatement in the hostility of one’s enemies must never be thought to signify they have been won over. It only means that one has ceased to constitute a threat.
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.
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.
Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?
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.
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.
Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.
The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.
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.
Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is for a little while. It is alimony that is for ever.