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