Quotes About Sade

The impossibility of outraging nature is the greatest anguish man can know.

Sade's ultimate achievement was to make sex the choicest expression of obscene cruelty and absolute, despotic power.

If Sade's books are the kind which the French inelegantly describe as needing to be read with one hand, it is a sensible precaution to hold a sick-bowl in the other.

Whether or not it is dangerous to read Sade is a question that easily becomes lost in a multitude of others and has never been settled except by those whose arguments are rooted in the conviction that reading leads to trouble. So it does; so it must, for reading leads nowhere but to questions.

The conflict, Marat/Sade (which should really be Marx/Sade, except that the ingenious Mr. Weiss was not quite ingenious enough to devise a historical conjunction between uncle Karl and the Marquis), is the conflict between anarchy and tyranny. Sade, not Marat or Marx, is the true revolutionary, for he aims at a world outside the crucible of punishment-and-submission, while they aim at a new world still within that crucible.

Punishment, discipline, obedience—these are the keys to such mysteries, and to the mystery of war itself, and to all oddities of behavior in Man and the other domestic animals. Sade saw it, and was banned for 150 years. He saw the genital fever, the need for embrace, dammed up at the center of man. Another reason he was banned.

I dreamed I called D.A.F. de Sade on the phone and asked him, Jesus told me that he and you agree on at least one thing and it explains freedom. What is that one thing? Quite simple, he replied, don't be afraid of the Cross. The fear of death is the beginning of slavery. And the line went dead with a triumphant click like a barred door falling open.

The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.

It was rightly said of Sade that his is the work of a moralist. Erotic books are almost all alike in this respect: either they are working toward the elaboration of a revolutionary morality, or they echo the morality of their age, against which they are protesting.

For Sade, all tenderness is false, a deceit, a trap; all pleasure contains within itself the seeds of atrocities; all beds are minefields.

Sade's manicheistic dualism sees the world as irredeemably evil; vice must always prosper, virtue always despair. There is no hope for us as we are now.[...]Sade's vision is utterly without transcendence.

One of Sade's singularities is that he offers an absolutely sexualised view of the world, a sexualisation that permeates everything, much as his atheism does and, since he is not a religious man but a political man, he treats the facts of female sexuality not as a moral dilemma but as a political reality.

Sin and contraception aside, anal intercourse has an egalitarian lure for Sade. If sexual relations are implicitly political in Sade, the sexual act, among equals, is one of mutual if sequential dominance.

Sade's work, with its compulsive attraction for the delinquent imagination of the romantics, has been instrumental in shaping aspects of the modern sensibility; its paranoia, its despair, its sexual terrors, its omnivorous egocentricity, its tolerance of massacre, holocaust, annihilation.

My books - I kid you not - are very often shelved between DeLillo and de Sade. Which not only completely cracks me up, but it seems like an encouraging message from the universe: between those two, there's a lot of wiggle room. I feel just fine there.

Soñé que traducía al Marqués de Sade a golpes de hacha. Me había vuelto loco y vivía en un bosque.

Sade and Genet both achieved freedom by squeezing it out of their characters. If Apollinaire was right to describe Sade, who spent more than half his adult life in prison, as 'the most free spirit that ever lived', this is how he achieved freedom.

120 journées is a diabolically ingenious machine which simultaneously inverts the reality of Sade's situation and subverts the morality that justified it.

One of the stock arguments against describing the sexual act is that it is always the same. Sade's structure is based on the conviction that it is not: an enormously extended set of variations moves progressively away from the original theme. This was not merely a stratagem for avoiding repetition: it was a logical development from the assumption that to the connoisseur of sexual pleasure, diversification is essential.

Sade never understood how exceptional he was in not feeling frightened of freedom.

It cannot be evil to strip away superstitions, prejudices and inhibitions when they stand in the way of harmless physical pleasures, but Sade compulsively develops his narrative to culminate in evil-doing that cannot fail to alienate his readers.

But why did Sade need so much brutality? Why not simply write hymns of praise to the orgasm, indulging his preference for anal intercourse by implanting similar tastes in his heroes? He was still using literature as a means of unpicking the past, inverting reality.

Sade never got into the habit of concerning himself with what other people were thinking and feeling. As with Genet, the soil in which perversion grew was habitual solitude and constant frustration of the need to feel loved.

But Sade behaved exactly as if he could not tolerate the possibility that his troubles might be over. He launched immediately into a new bout of provocative debauchery.