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

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.

His [de Sade's] achievement is that before the Romantic movement had been launched, he succeeded in making solipsism look like omniscience.

Just as a sense of wrongdoing had been integral to his [de Sade's] sexual pleasure—he preferred the anal position for moral as much as sensual reasons—the pleasure he took in immoralism was almost physical.

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.

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.

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.

Between a man and his mother-in-law, as between a woman and her father-in-law, unacknowledged sexual desire can easily open a wound which will go on festering with jealousy, resentment and hatred, but no woman has ever waged war against her son-in-law more relentlessly than she {Madame de Montreuil] did.

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.

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