Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.

I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.

I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.

We are all mediators, translators.

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.

The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.

These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.

The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn't put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.

In philosophy, you have to reckon with the implicit level of an accumulated reserve, and thus with a very great number of relays, with the shared responsibility of these relays.

I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.

To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.

Who ever said that one was born just once?

My most resolute opponents believe that I am too visible, that I am a little too alive, that my name echoes too much in the texts which they nevertheless claim to be inaccessible.

Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?

Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scen.

In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction.

These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.

I have always had trouble recognizing myself in the features of the intellectual playing his political role according to the screenplay that you are familiar with and whose heritage deserves to be questioned.

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.

I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.

Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.

Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school.

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived.

The circle of the return to birth can only remain open but this is a chance a sign of life and a wound.

Everything is arranged so that it be this way this is what is called culture.

Speech is a text, gesture is a text, reality is a text in this new sense. This is not about re-establishing graphocentrism alongside logocentrism or phonocentrism or text-centrism. The text is not a centre. The text is an openness without borders, of ever-differentiating references.

Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead -- a dead parent, for example -- can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.

I was not a trained actor.

My favorite driver is always either the bad guy or the underdog.

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?

Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.

I was supposed to be women's lib, and now I'd exceeded it and gone over into international politics.

I worked with John, but I had enough sense to walk just a little ways behind him. I could have made more records, but I wanted to have a marriage.

Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.

I grew up with injustice and could do nothing about it. But once in America, I had freedom of choice.

While we share the same set of values, we can - and do - have different business interests. Dad has been there to give me career advice along the way, but he has always let me call the play.

On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.

I have an avocado tree at my place in Los Angeles - it's the smoother-skinned one, which tends to be a little stringy. Often the birds or raccoons get the avocados before I can harvest them. I have figs, too, which are great with prosciutto, of course. I have limes and lemons, which I use to make lemonade.

Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint and the soil and sky as canvas.

I ran my own business when I was 19, buying condos and renovating apartment buildings.

We are a trading nation, and we are trading with Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland.

It's hard to store natural gas. And it does require big storage tanks. So it doesn't work very well on passenger cars.