More Excerpts From The Naked Civil Servant. Quentin Crisp.

212. We think we write definitively of those parts of our nature that are dead and therefore beyond change, but that which writes is still changing--still in doubt.

208. It would have been impossible to get through the kind of life that I have known without accumulating a vast unused stockpile of rage. . . . Wishing to go out in a blaze of ignominy, I shall limit my activities to killing a policeman.

203. In everybody the anus is at least as capable of sexual excitement as the lips.

198. I came to the conclusion that beauty was not a girl but an Aryan face seen through Semitic eyes.

193. It is universally agreed that men are neither heterosexual nor homosexual; they are just sexual.

177. There are three reasons for becoming a writer. The first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; and the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings. I expect the liveliest books are written from a combination of all three motives. I had only the financial one and that may have been part of the cause of my failure.

175. If anyone had asked me where I felt most at home I could have replied, "In the wrong."

172. Until I was forty it had never dawned on me that I was not immortal. I had once said to the Czech's true love, "I can never get it into my head that I shall one day die." She replied, "Neither can I, but I practice like mad."

166. In the last analysis I cannot say that I have ever refrained from taking any course of action on the ground that it was wrong or illegal or immoral.