Quentin S. Crisp Quotes

Quotes about:

• I don't know if Britain ever really achieved that much glamour. We had post-war austerity rather than post-war prosperity, and our cultural products of the time include some pretty dour kitchen-sink dramas of the A Kind of Loving variety. (This kind of film seems disillusioned with the sixties before they've even really begun.)

  Quentin S. Crisp

  War, Drama, Kitchen

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  7 Copy quote

• I like the concept of an anti-muse, though I'm not quite sure what that is. If there is such a thing in my life, I suppose it is just this weariness, this sense that it is more fulfilling not to exist, to efface all traces, than to limit oneself to the determined expression of manifestation.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Expression, Limits, Determined

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  7 Copy quote

• I feel almost as if I had been born in a vacuum of innocence, and then had to come to terms with the fact that actually, I was born into the middle of history - the rather grimy normality of the 70s, which did, indeed, retain some traces of human innocence, but were also girded about by the demons of experience.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Vacuums, Facts, Innocence

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think the seventies caught the last red rays of the dying sun of this innocence, but were already a little cold and drab.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Thinking, Dying, Rays

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• [Antinatalism ] seems to oppose the idea of writing anything at all. To reproduce is to pass on genes. To write is to pass on memes. In that sense, it really is a kind of reproduction, which antinatalism should, theoretically, oppose, or at least which I feel that it opposes emotionally in my own experience.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Writing, Ideas, Kind

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

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

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Sea, Special, Landscape

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• My favourite tea is lapsang souchong.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Tea, Favourite

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• I've never been baptised.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• I'm more a dog person than a cat person.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Dog, Cat, Persons

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

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

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Age, Born, Colour

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• I never seem to find what I'm looking for, though. I suppose I feel, these days, too aware of schedules and things, to let myself get lost in the rain. Anyway, I came back home, and it was still raining, and as I was approaching the driveway of the house, and the front garden with its bushy flower bed, I caught a cooking smell from somewhere on the air. I don't know why, exactly, but it appealed to me as a Nagai Kafu moment.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Rain, Flower, Home

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Buddhism, Expression, Rejection

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• [My muse] is, in fact, a woman of the world, and precisely because of this, hopes that a diversity of cultures will endure, and that one bland monoculture does not swamp everything.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Diversity, Doe, Culture

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• As children in the seventies we were told about nebulous 'strangers'. By definition, we didn't know who these strangers were, and we didn't know what they wanted to do, but only that they were sinister. I think that was the stage the seventies were at.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Children, Thinking, Definitions

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Mean, Buddhism, Dwelling

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Philosophy, Cosmic

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• Non-pantheist models for god seem almost completely untenable to me, though not without interest.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Interest, Models, Seems

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• What I find difficult about Buddhism, though it is also one of its significant fascinations, is the focus on what is immediately and physically present. To me, this seems a denial of the imagination, and the imagination is very important to me.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Buddhism, Imagination, Focus

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think [imagination] very austere element of Buddhism is also linked with a strong antinatalist strain in the philosophy. The Buddha was enlightened when he destroyed the house of body and soul into which he would otherwise have been forever reborn. This is clearly antinatalism.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Strong, Philosophy, Buddhism

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Children, Father, Philosophy

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• [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.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Buddhist, Voice, Catholic

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• Apart from the underlying mystery of all things, there is also another possible specific mystery in this situation: Why did I become so interested in Buddhism, Zen and so on? I seem to have a Buddhist voice in my head, and someone asked me about this recently, saying he was intrigued.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Buddhist, Buddhism, Voice

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Buddhist, Past, Views

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• If you look at the ox-herding pictures - specifically the newer set of ten pictures rather than the older set of eight - you see that after the blank circle of the void, the cycle comes back to a river flowing by the roots of a tree (both strong symbols of nature, the life-force, the unconscious) and to the wanderer returning to the market place, which is the realm of human society and activity.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Strong, Circles, Roots

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

• There's a possible qualification I can make here about a non-pantheist god that is in some way tenable, and that is the idea of a god that has in some way discharged the universe from its own substance (I associate this with the word 'tzimtzum'), possibly even by a form of suicide - a suicide that might have been the Big Bang.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Suicide, Ideas, Might

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

  4 Copy quote

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