It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.

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.

Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.

We are freer than we think.

Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.

[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.

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.