I am a free-loader (From Resident Alien)
Every person of my age deplores the contemporary scene because deploring is a rich person's hobby. Writers are great deplorers and writers are always rich. They have the spare time to write. Indeed it is the plethora of hours that is their undoing. Poor Mr Wordsworth and Mr Tennyson wandered about the Lake District or sat in their town houses trying to find something - anything - to pontificate about and wrote a lot of rubbish because of this lack of urgency, this absence of engagement.
Mr Hemingway and Mr Mailer scribble between other activities, which does nothing for their style but increases the excitement in their writings.
Those who are compelled to work do not deplore the changes that have come to modern life. They welcome fast transport, immediate communication, universal hygiene, modern medicine and the fact that now justice reaches into the smallest pockets of society. But I, who have not worked in many a long year, do not notice these improvements. I am concerned with the high gloss on society, not with its inner machinery. I am a free-loader, a dilettante, a butterfly on the wheel.
And that's putting it nicely.
QUENTIN CRISP
New York, Spring 1999
Those who are compelled to work do not deplore the changes that have come to modern life. They welcome fast transport, immediate communication, universal hygiene, modern medicine and the fact that now justice reaches into the smallest pockets of society. But I, who have not worked in many a long year, do not notice these improvements. I am concerned with the high gloss on society, not with its inner machinery. I am a free-loader, a dilettante, a butterfly on the wheel.
And that's putting it nicely.
QUENTIN CRISP
New York, Spring 1999