Life & Wisdom Quote by Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp turns the world into a cheeky bureaucracy of desire, then yanks the label-maker out of the drawer. A "house of assignation" is old-school euphemism: a place designed for clandestine sex, all velvet curtains and plausible deniability. Crisp’s wicked upgrade is to scale it up to "the whole world", then cripple it with a lost "filing system". The joke lands because it treats erotic life like paperwork - as if longing were orderly, indexable, and subject to clerical control. Then it admits what everyone suspects: the records are gone, the categories don’t hold, and the clerk is missing.

The intent is both comic and diagnostic. Crisp isn’t simply being risqué; he’s puncturing the fantasy that society can keep desire in its proper folders: respectable vs. deviant, public vs. private, romance vs. vice. The subtext carries the lived intelligence of a gay man who survived decades when "assignation" wasn’t a flirtatious word but a survival tactic. In that context, the line reads like a shrug at the world’s pretend moral architecture. People act scandalized, yet everything runs on secret rendezvous, coded signals, and selective forgetting.

The lost filing system is also Crisp’s philosophy of identity avant la lettre: sexuality and intimacy don’t sort cleanly, and the attempt to make them sortable is the real farce. It’s a one-sentence argument for chaos - not as tragedy, but as liberation, delivered with a camp accountant’s deadpan.