John Cleland

"Truth! stark naked truth, is the word, and I will not so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze-wrapper on it."

"All my foundation in virtue was no other than a total ignorance of vice."

"Your Grace ordered a prosecution against the Printer and publisher of The Memoires of a Lady of Pleasure, the same Bookseller, on Griffiths (as I apprehend) has published within a few Days a book called Memoires of Fanny Hill, the Lewdest thing I ever saw.... I beg of your Grace to give proper orders to stop the progress of this vile Book which is an open insult upon Religion and good manners, and a reproach to the Honour of the Government and the Law of the Country."

"Cleland, curious figure. Thought how ’twould have struck you some years ago…"

"[T]hat most licentious and inflaming book"

"Found him in an old house in the Savoy, just by the waterside. A coarse, ugly old man for his servant. His room, filled with books in confusion and dust was like Dupont’s and old Lady Eglinton’s, at least old ideas were suggested to me as if I were in a castle. He was drinking tea and eating biscuits. I joined him. He had a rough cap like Rousseau, and his eyes were black and piercing.... He had resolutely persisted. There was something genteel in his manner amidst this oddity."

"I imagined, indeed, that you would have been cloyed and tired with the uniformity of adventures and expressions, inseparable from a subject of this sort, whose bottom or groundwork being, in the nature of things, eternally one and the same, whatever variety of forms and modes the situations are susceptible of, there is no escaping a repetition of near the same images, the same figures, the same expressions."

"I feeling pretty sensibly that it was not going by the right door and knocking desperately at the wrong one, I told him of it: "Pooh," says he "my dear, any port in a storm."

"[He] went as consul to Smyrna, where, perhaps, he first imbibed those loose principles which, in a subsequent publication, too infamous to be particularised, tarnished his reputation as an author…. In this situation [debtors’ prison], one of the booksellers who disgrace the profession, offered him a temporary relief for writing the work above alluded to, which brought a stigma on his name, which time has not obliterated, and which will be consigned to his memory whilst its poisonous contents are in circulation…. In conversation he was very pleasant and anecdotal, understanding most of the living languages, and speaking them all very fluently. As a writer, he shewed himself best in novels, song-writing, and the lighter species of authorship; but when he touched politics, he touched it like a torpedo, he was cold, benumbing, and soporific."