The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.

People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.

Where there is power, there is resistance.

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations

Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.

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.

Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?

I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

Nostalgia is best cured via horse whipping.

A person at an eminent position does not need money. A chairman of a big company or something like that, I can’t buy him and the country does not have enough money to ‘buy’ him.

A work of art comes out of a state of deep stillness.

For me, my travels have been the chance to go to a place that already exists in my imagination.

When the time comes for you to make a change or to grow, the universe will make you so uncomfortable you will eventually have no choice.

We survive our love because we go on loving.

There's other ways to protect yourself and your family, Arlen. Wisdom. Prudence. Humility. It's not brave to fight a battle you can't win.

Making a movie is the same as an orchestra; it's moving all the different instruments and the sounds, the kinetic and the auditory and the visual all together. I'm probably the trombone.

Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken.

Sit by my side, and let the world slip: we shall ne'er be younger.