from the introduction by A. Alvarez

LS is a distinctly 'modern' novelist. He has the freedom, the total originality, the sense of a man creating the form from scratch and for himself, that we now expect from any serious artist. He has, too, the modernist's indifference to rules, as though aesthetic formalities were, in the final amalysis, boring, and the only vindication of a work of art were the immediacy with which it expresses the personality of it creator. Casualness, in short, was his declared artistic principle. [my italics] (p7)

the picaresque is essentially the form for obsessional story-tellers: one tale leads compulsively to another. (p7-8)

The whole rickety substance is supported and validated simply by the flow of talk, talk, talk. (p8)

Controlled inconsequentiality, irrelevance and continual interruption (p8)

He wrote to his daughter that the design of the book was 'to teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do - so it runs most upon those gentle passions and affections, which aid so much to it' (p11)

and that is my Journey, which shall make you cry as much as ever it made me laugh - or I'll give up the Business of sentimental writing - and write to the body. (p11)

The more elegantly sentimental the narrator's responses, the more absurd the after-effects. (p13)

no matter how whole-heartedly he pursues high feeling, unredeemed reality keeps breaking in. (p13)

What Sterne and Godard have in common is a style and an obsession, or rather, a style to cope with an obsession. By style I mean something beyond their elegance and wit and detachment. Instead, it is the ability to maintain all those qualities whilst not leaving anything out, whilst refusing a narrow, exclusive focus. (p14)

And the action itself is casual. The plot in Godard's movies may be marginally tighter than in Sterne's novels, but it is rarely more important. What matters are the incidents that proliferate along the route, and the way in which they are handled. (p15)

The joke is there for those to see it, but is not insistent enough to offend those who can't. Either way, it remains a joke; the criterion is enjoyment; the aurthor demands simply that the reader relish as much as he does the full ambiguous subtlety of the situation, with no moral parti pris. (p17)

Sterne, by his own confession, also thought of himself as a man obsessed by women, a perpetually pinning lover. It seems to me to be nearer the truth to say that he was obsessed by feeling itself. (p18)

He [Sterne] was in the final months of his life, knowingly dying of consumption, racked by the after-effects of a savage cure for venereal disease, and desperate at the loss of a woman with whom he was - or imagined himself to be - violently in love. Mercifully none of this gets into the Journey. Instead it is chronicled at length in his Journal to Eliza, which was written literally in tandem with the novel. [...] So to say that it is a terrible production - indulgent, self-pitying, hysterical - is beside the point. Yet by the tiresome excess itself, the Journal somehow validates the Journey. For it helps to define a quality ion the wit which is hard to pin down. (p18)