Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp Author

• I have always lived my life in the profession of being.
• A pinch of notoriety will do.
• I am not famous; I am notorious and if I am rich it is because I have taken my wages in people.
• (on domesticity) After four years, the dust doesn't get any worse.
• I am one of the stately homos of old England.
• When asked, "Should I tell my mother I'm gay?" I answer, "Never tell your mother anything."
• If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
• A lifetime of listening to disco music is a high price to pay for one's sexual preference.
• A dropout? I was never in, you know.
• Never try to keep up with the Joneses...drag them down to your level. It's cheaper!
• Teaching is for teachers, not students...and if you'd known that when you were at school, all of your suffering would have been at least explicable.
• The time comes for everyone to do deliberately what he used to do by mistake . . . If you are effeminate by nature, you have to find some way of telling the world that you know you are, otherwise they keep telling you.
• [A]nother 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."
  • The Naked Civil Servant
• "You'll never be wanted," [a draft board official] said, and thrust at me a smaller piece of paper. This described me as being incapable of being graded in grades A, B, etc., because I suffered from sexual perversion. When the story of my disgrace became one of the contemporary fables of Chelsea, a certain Miss Marshall said, "I don't much care for the expression 'suffering from.' Shouldn't it be 'glorying in'?"
  • The Naked Civil Servant
• 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.
  • The Naked Civil Servant