We no more choose our passions than our features or complexions

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

He was the universe to me, and all that was not him, was nothing to me.

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.

Truth is irresistible. The vivacity of its coloring has quite a different effect from the daub of falsity or invention.

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 …

That delicate glutton, my nether mouth.