John Cleland Quotes

John Cleland was an English novelist best known as the author of Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

✵ 24. September 1709 – 23. January 1789

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Fanny Hill

John Cleland

John Cleland: 6 quotes 0 likes

Famous John Cleland Quotes

“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.”

John Cleland book Fanny Hill

Page 39
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

“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."”

John Cleland book Fanny Hill

Page 178
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

“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

As recounted to James Boswell. 13 April, 1779, in Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck.

“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.”

John Cleland book Fanny Hill

Page 129
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

“I now wonder that my book could so long, escape the Vigilance of the Guardians of the Public Manners since nothing is truer than that more Clergymen bought it in proportion than any other distinction of men…. The Bishops can take no step to punishing the author that will not powerfully contribute to the notoriety of the book….
a Book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my Soul, buried and forgot.”

John Cleland

Letter from John Cleland to Lovel Stanhope, Law Clerk in the Secretary of State’s Office, 13 November, 1749.

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

John Cleland book Fanny Hill

Page 40
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

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