"If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style"
About this Quote
Quentin Crisp turns a saccharine self-help axiom into a needle, and you can feel the punk pleasure of the puncture. "If at first you don't succeed" is usually the prelude to moral uplift: try harder, polish yourself, earn belonging. Crisp yanks the ladder away. "Failure may be your style" reframes non-achievement not as a temporary setback but as an aesthetic and social identity. The joke lands because it treats "style" - that supposedly frivolous surface category - as the real battleground where society rewards conformity and punishes difference.
Crisp's intent is less to celebrate laziness than to expose the coercion hidden in motivational language. Perseverance is often code for assimilation: keep going until you're legible, employable, respectable. Crisp, a gay man who made a career out of being unrespectable on his own terms, understands that some people are asked to "succeed" at becoming someone else. In that light, opting into "failure" can be a refusal to audition for acceptance.
The subtext is bracingly cynical: the system's metrics are rigged, so why worship them? Yet it's also liberating. Crisp suggests you can alchemize what the world calls defeat into a signature - a deliberate stance, not an apology. The line is compact because it has to be; it mimics the quick, defensive wit of someone who's spent decades turning insults into material. It's not advice as much as a strategy for surviving a culture that confuses compliance with merit.
Crisp's intent is less to celebrate laziness than to expose the coercion hidden in motivational language. Perseverance is often code for assimilation: keep going until you're legible, employable, respectable. Crisp, a gay man who made a career out of being unrespectable on his own terms, understands that some people are asked to "succeed" at becoming someone else. In that light, opting into "failure" can be a refusal to audition for acceptance.
The subtext is bracingly cynical: the system's metrics are rigged, so why worship them? Yet it's also liberating. Crisp suggests you can alchemize what the world calls defeat into a signature - a deliberate stance, not an apology. The line is compact because it has to be; it mimics the quick, defensive wit of someone who's spent decades turning insults into material. It's not advice as much as a strategy for surviving a culture that confuses compliance with merit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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