“Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.”

This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other’s heart.

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.

It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.

Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

Davey Crocket, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland.

Growing up in Poland, I didn’t have the experience of going to Disneyland as a child, so I don’t have any childhood memories connected to it, good or bad.