“There are times inlife when the question of knowing if one can think differentlythan one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, isabsolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflectingat all.”

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

“[Raymond Roussel] said that after his first book he expected that the next morning there would be a kind of aura around his person and that everyone in the street would be able to see that he had written a book. This is the obscure desire harboured by everyone who writes. It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor because one is what one is: one writes to become other than what one is. One tries to modify one's way of being through the act of writing.”

“From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.”

“But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.”

“[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 relation is already present: an illusion, then, to denounce this relation for a repression exerted after the event.”

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.”