I now know that if you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp is wryly mapping three literary “labels” onto how audiences react to depictions of reality. To idealize the world is to be tagged a romantic; to emphasize its ugliness is to be praised (or dismissed) as a realist. But the punchline is that an exact, unvarnished description—because it exposes contradictions and absurdities without overt exaggeration—gets read as satire. The remark reflects Crisp’s broader persona: a sharp observer of social performance and hypocrisy, especially around respectability and taste. It suggests that “objectivity” in art is unstable: reception depends less on factual accuracy than on the discomfort a truthful portrayal can provoke.