“Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.”

“Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.”

“The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploit...”

“After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover...in our discourse...”

“Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of ...”

“The necessity of reform mustnt be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tel...”

“I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothin...”

“With humanity, life has ended up with a living creature that never quite finds itself in the right place, a living creature destined to wander and endlessly make mistakes.”

“[T]hus one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, the power rel...”

“What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I dont know. Likewise, I dont know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what I want to preserve. As reader...”

“What is it about the American obsession with productivity and responsibility that makes it so difficult for us to allow ourselves a little time to solve the puzzle of our own lives, before its too ...”

“I truly dont understand why at every Q and A, someone always asks, Do you have a routine? or Do you write every morning? Why those questions remain interesting, I really have no idea. But since no ...”

“Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”

“As time and space are bent by gravity, so too is truth bent by power.”

“What a curious power words have.”