Jacques Derrida Quotes

There is nothing outside of the text. [Fr., Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.]

I am like a child ready for the apocalypse, I am the apocalypse itself, that is to say, the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict.

I love language as I love life itself!

An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me.

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.

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

I rightly pass for an atheist.

No one will ever know from what secret I am writing and the fact that I say so changes nothing.

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

I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect.

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

Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters, ' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.