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.

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

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.

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.

There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.

To minimize my guilt at going to the pictures — to call this wanton pursuit of an effete pleasure by another name — I needed movie companions as drunkards need drinking partners. If I entered a cinema alone, God might plunge his arm through the roof of the auditorium booming in a stereophonic voice, "And you, Crisp, what are you doing here?" I would never have dared reply, "I’m just enjoying myself, Lord." I remembered too well what happened to Mr and Mrs Adam. A commissionaire with a flaming sword came and asked them to leave.

God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen. It had become obvious that he was never going to do a thing I said.