“Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.”

If you don’t stay in some days, you can’t recharge your batteries.

It may be true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance, but it’s also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts.

If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn.

The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call “the trouble with you.” Nevertheless, the journey is worth making.

Abatement in the hostility of one’s enemies must never be thought to signify they have been won over. It only means that one has ceased to constitute a threat.

The flagrantly gay Quentin Crisp dealt with homophobic bullying by refusing to bow to its onslaught. His number listed in the phone directory, he responded to derogatory remarks accompanied with a stated intent to kill him by asking, “Would you like to make an appointment?”

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.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as ‘Soho’ poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

Quentin Crisp (to handsome young man on the street): “What’s the matter, sexy? Don’t you like dehydrated fruit?

In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.

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

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

I never say ‘No’ to anything.

Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?

I don’t think you can really be proud of being gay because it isn’t something you’ve done. You can only be proud of not being ashamed.