As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode with — Quentin Crisp

"At the age of ninety, it has finally been explained to me that I am not really homosexual, Im transgender. I now accept that. I no longer see myself as homosexual, though it is a word I have used to describe myself and which others have understandably used to describe me. I dont actually see myself as a man though, of course, I know Im not physically a woman. The only thing in my life I have wanted and didnt get was to be a woman. [...] I dont dress like a woman ... I think my body is too like a mans body to have lived as a woman with any kind of success. I refer to myself as homosexual without thinking because of how I have lived my life."

"I suppose when I was a child, when I lived almost entirely in a dream world, I suppose I thought of myself as a woman, but later on you realise you have to live in the real world and that you are not. You are only in some senses effeminate or feminine, and you must make this compromise, you must learn to live in a world where statistically you are a man, whatever you may think about yourself. I didnt want to become anything. Once Id accepted the world, all I wanted was that the world should understand what kind of person I was."

"Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going."

"It would be impossible to get through the kind of life that I have known without accumulating a vast unused stockpile of rage. Retaliation, though, was a luxury I could never afford. On the physical level I was too feeble. On any other I was not rich enough. I never dared to be rude to anyone. I never knew that I might not need him later. Long after fantasies of sexual excess had ceased to torment me, my imagination was inflamed by lurid day-dreams of having my revenge on the world."

"I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!"

"I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east."