# Quote — Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

> 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.

- Author: [Quentin Crisp](https://www.leafyquotes.com/quentin-crisp.md)
- Book: [The Naked Civil Servant](https://www.leafyquotes.com/quentin-crisp/the-naked-civil-servant.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Quentin_Crisp#The_Naked_Civil_Servant_(1968)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/quentin-crisp/the-naked-civil-servant/to-minimize-my-guilt

## More from this book

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/quentin-crisp/the-naked-civil-servant/to-read-a-novel.md)

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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/quentin-crisp/the-naked-civil-servant/michelangelo-worked-from.md)

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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/quentin-crisp/the-naked-civil-servant/posing-was-the.md)