If Quentin Crisp was on Twitter, Would we all Hate Him?

A guest post from Cathy Leech

When Quentin Crisp died on 21st November 1999, the internet, and by extension the world, was a very different place.

Crisp dedicated the best part of a century to his "profession of being", dishing out epigrams and idiosyncratic musings to whomever would listen. He even moved to America because he found it more tolerant of his self-obsession. I can’t help thinking that if he was around today and had managed to get to grips with what he called the "demon machine", he would surely be drawn to Twitter along with the rest of us witty and not-so-witty narcissists.

So many of Crisp's great lines come in neatly at under 140 characters, it's almost as if the medium was designed for him:

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things other people think about us.

I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.

I could go on and on quoting snippets like this, and I can only imagine what more gems he might have come up with if he’d lived to enjoy an age where he could publish his thoughts to a mass audience at the touch of a keypad.

But in a way, perhaps it's for the best that he didn't live become a Twitter celebrity. As it is, what I think of when I think of Quentin Crisp is his unique and fascinating approach to life, captured so beautifully in his autobiography The Naked Civil Servant. What I try not to think about is the odiously offensive off-the-cuff remarks he occasionally made, mostly in the vein of his notorious assertion that "the world would be better without homosexuals".

Crisp was someone for whom it was inconceivable to admit he had been wrong. He privately made large donations to AIDS charities in his later years, after proclaiming to an audience in the 80s that "AIDS is a fad, nothing more". But he never said sorry, or took it back. Which makes me wonder if he would have been able to resist the temptation to tweet similarly vile, offensive things, knowing that they would be so much more likely to trend on the back of a wave of outrage than any more benign witticism he could come up with. And he'd join the ranks of Suzanne Moore and Baroness Hussein-Ece, becoming known to thousands of people for the first time for saying something hateful and stupid.

He wrote of society’s gradual acceptance of him, over decades: “In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.” Better then perhaps that the twentieth century kept him. I would have been sad to see him come full circle, falling outside the realm of acceptability once again.
  
You can find Cathy on Twitter here. 
Give us your favourite 140 character epigrams in the comments.