Quote#Speech
I wrote it [Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure] to…
Quote byJohn Cleland · 1709–1789
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: As recounted to James Boswell (13 April 1779), in Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck..
English (original)
I wrote it [Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure] to prove that one could write so freely about a woman of the town without resorting to the the coarseness the School of Venus [L'Ecole des Filles], which had quite plain words. My printer and publisher certainly were deceived by my avoiding those rank words in the work, which are all that they judge obscenity by.
— John Cleland
More from John Cleland
That delicate glutton, my nether mouth.
He was the universe to me, and all that was not him, was nothing to me.
All my foundation in virtue was no other than a total ignorance of vice.
Truth is irresistible. The vivacity of its coloring has quite a different effect from the daub of falsity or invention.
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.
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."