Quentin Crisp

To read a novel or see a play was to drink life through a straw — to smoke it through a filter-tip. If we were not afraid of blackening our teeth or riddling our lungs with cancer — if we were a dauntless race of men with strong digestions — we would be able to devour life without the aid of these over-civilized devices.

Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.

Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.

An autobiography is obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

The low dive had set a standard that only middle-aged hooligans could remember and to which they looked back as Mrs Lot at Sodom.

If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.

I acquiesced in this on the grounds that the most anyone can expect from a holiday is a change of agony.

When stripped, I looked less like "Il David" than a plucked chicken that died of myxomatosis.

I never saw Portsmouth by day.

Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbours.

Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he..." This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him."

I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.