Resident Alien Quotes

“I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.”
― Quentin Crisp, Resident Alien

“Mrs. White ... said she didn't mind ageing, but did not want to be old. She deferred this inevitable state by never looking back, on the same principle, presumably, that prompts anyone walking along a girder twenty floors above the ground not to look down. Personally, I look neither forward, where there is doubt, nor backward, where there is regret; I look inward and ask myself not if there is anything out in the world that I want and had better grab quickly before nightfall, but whether there is anything inside me that I have not yet unpacked. I want to be certain that, before I fold my hands and step into my coffin, what little I can do and say has been completed.”
― Quentin Crisp, Resident Alien: The New York Diaries

“Sooner or later the time comes for almost everybody when, although he has sworn to himself he will never utter such sentiments, he declares that the country is going to the dogs, that life has become louder, public manners cruder, and art totally incomprehensible. When, he asks himself, will it all end?”
― Quentin Crisp, Resident Alien: The New York Diaries

“People have always imagined, or pretended to imagine, that I seek to provoke hostile attention. This is rubbish. What I want is to be accepted by other people without bevelling down my individuality to please them — because if I do that, all the attention, all the friendship, all the hospitality that I receive is really for somebody else of the same name.”
― Quentin Crisp, Resident Alien: The New York Diaries