Quentin Crisp Quotes

The public school system doesn't get everybody. Every generation has its rebels.

Never was a cornflake girl; Thought it was a good solution: hanging with the raisin girls.

Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation... about where you fit in society.

I was a snot-nosed teenage skater at one point, who listened to only punk records and hung around people that had that idea of what is okay to do and what isn't okay to do.

When you're young, it's all about the society of school and being cool, but they don't understand that somebody can be different and live a different lifestyle and still be a regular person. I was the same way when I was a kid.

People think that young people don't care about things, but I think they do care; they just aren't super interested in conforming to what older people think are the right way to do things.

I definitely went through some dark teenage years. I wore black raccoon eyeliner every single day. I would be late to school if I didn't have time to put my eyeliner on.

When I was a boy, I was sagging my pants like everyone else. Some boys become men and continue to sag their pants because that's their form of rebellion.

I just wanted to do the things that all normal teenagers wanted to do. So I did become quite rebellious.

I'm not out here trying putting on an act like I'm crazy. In my opinion, everyone else is crazy. They're the ones who put on an act for you, doing what they're told in front of the camera.

Young people want to look like peas in a pod, and there is no use trying to make them different.

I went to public school for like, one day. I don't get it. Everybody tries to be exactly the same. I think being an outsider is a good thing.

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

At every point I am besieged by people who would like me to conform to some social norm of whatever sort of social group they expect me to be a part of. I never have any identification with these social groups.

I think when your parents are as rebellious as mine were, it's difficult to top them. So what's the point?

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

I was growing up in the New Wave period, but that wasn't allowed in school. I remember moments when they wouldn't let four people dressed in black stand together on the playground.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

I remember in seventh grade we used to wear lipstick to school, and the teachers would get so angry, and they'd steal our lipstick if we had them.

I don't want to just be in the normal kind of teen movie.

I wasn't a good rule-breaker when I was younger.

Just because you have teenagers in a movie doesn't make it a teen movie.

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.