Quentin Crisp

I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east.

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

God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen.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.

The measure of woman's distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr's crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.

I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!

All liaisons between homosexuals are conducted as though they were between a chorus girl and a bishop. In some cases both parties think they are bishops.

Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going.

Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.

The rest of the world in which I lived was still stumbling about in search of a weapon with which to exterminate this monster [homosexuality] whose shape and size were not yet known or even guessed at. It was thought to be Greek in origin, smaller than socialism but more deadly, especially to children.

If one is not going to take the necessary precautions to avoid having parents, one must undertake to bring them up.

Many [hooligans] discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots and, greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope. The fathers superior of the order do not try to influence their children in Satan; they merely shake their heads in sorrow. They know that the apostate must work out his own damnation.

Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is for a little while. It is alimony that is for ever.

The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, \'I wish you hadn't made every line funny. It's so depressing.

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

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

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn't even want the beastly thing.

I never saw Portsmouth by day.

The proprietor had hair so red that pigmentation had flowed out into every visible inch of his skin and even into the pinks of his eyes, as the colour of flowering cherry trees stains their leaves.

The distinction between indoors and outdoors, which in England is usually so marked, was temporarily suspended in a hot gauzy haze.

As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, \'they can't leave anything alone.

I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to \'Hamlet\' on the grounds that I knew who won.

Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.

I have come to think that both sex and politics are a mistake and that any attempt to establish a connection between the two is the greatest error of all.

In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!

I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.

Assoon as I stepped out of my mother's womb on to dry land, I realized that I had made a mistake?but the trouble with children is that they are not returnable.

Los Angeles is just New York lying down.

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained. If you have no personality, you may be able to save your face and, possibly, your entire anatomy by following the current fashion, but all we shall know about you, when we see you coming down the street, is that you had enough money to buy a glossy magazine and were sufficiently cunning to work out the cut of the garments shown therein.

You see, astrology is like fortune-telling. If you can't get it right, you say, \'Well, if Venus was doing something peculiar in the background, that would alter your prognostication--because, of course, astrology is rubbish.

I became one of the stately homos of England.