"To arrive at the end of your life thinking, I never did anything I really wanted to do must be one of the most profound miseries the human soul is capable of feeling." Quentin Crisp spent a lifetime getting his own way in the face of insults, derision, violence and humiliations beyond belief. He made his life on earth a work of art, an art that did not begin to be truly appreciated until he reached his earthly paradise, a crammed, dusty bed-sitter in a New York rooming house in Lower Manhattan.

- Clive Fisher, The Independent, November 1999