Quentin Crisp Quotes on Identity

7 quotes

  1. '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'?'

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

  3. The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this problem by defying their elders and copying each other.

  4. I became one of the stately homos of England.

  5. A dropout? I was never in, you know.

  6. A lifetime of listening to disco music is a high price to pay for one's sexual preference.

  7. 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.

All Quentin Crisp quotes