The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.

If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.

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.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

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.

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.

'Late bloomer' is another way of saying 'slow learner.'

I never listen to music when I'm writing.

I think if you spend much time dwelling on influence you can get self-conscious about every line you write. That's a great way to freeze up.

I'm ashamed and embarrassed to say that I've read very little of David Foster Wallace's work. It's a huge gap in my education, one of many.

The main thing about writing is... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work.

After Bush was elected in 2004 - please note that I didn't say 're-elected' - and I was walking around in my befuzzed state of confusion and low-grade depression, I set out more or systematically to read writers who'd grappled with that fundamental question of what America is, why it is the way it is.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn't go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually.

The smartest thing I did in law school: asking my future wife to go out dancing with me. The smartest thing I did when practicing law: quitting. The smartest thing I've done in writing: following my own head and writing what I wanted to write, and nothing but.