Quote #19

'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'?'

More from Quentin Crisp

  1. The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose th…
  2. When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I lived in Clerkenwell that the only complete sol…
  3. God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen.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 thin…
  4. Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
  5. If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.
  6. 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 m…
  7. Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.
  8. There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

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