Quentin Crisp - The Naked Civil Servant (1975)

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

Quentin Crisp
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.

Quentin Crisp
I acquiesced in this on the grounds that the most anyone can expect from a holiday is a change of agony.

Quentin Crisp
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."

Quentin Crisp
Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

Quentin Crisp
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing.

Quentin Crisp
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.

Quentin Crisp
Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

Quentin Crisp
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.

Quentin Crisp
When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I lived in Clerkenwell that the only complete solution to my problems was suicide. I never brought it off. I was afraid... Hopelessness was thinly spread like a drizzle over my whole outlook. But, in an emergency, I could not find a puddle of despondency deep enough to drown in.

Quentin Crisp
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.

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

Quentin Crisp
When stripped, I looked less like "Il David" than a plucked chicken that died of myxomatosis.

Quentin Crisp
In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

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

Quentin Crisp
I now know that if you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Quentin Crisp
To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

Quentin Crisp
Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who... have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies.

Quentin Crisp