How to Have a Lifestyle Quotes

“I now realize that education is a last wild effort on the part of the authorities to prevent an overdose of leisure from driving the world mad. Learning is no longer an improver; it is merely the most expensive time-filler the world has ever known.”
― Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle

“All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth.”
― Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle

“Style is not the man; it is something better. It is a dizzy, dazzling structure that he erects about himself using as building materials selected elements from his own character.”
― Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle

“The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.”
― Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle

“Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.”
― Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle

“Lord Snow says that every man may be permitted his own clichés. But this is not enough. He must invent his own clichés and then persist in them until, if other people use them, their source is instantly recognizable. Thus plagiarism shall be turned into homage.”
― Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle