“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 very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.

Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.

There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each.

When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?

Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved – commitment to a scenario.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.

Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.

The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.

If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.

Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartednes s that requires the true courage — however often we are hurt as a result of it.

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

Innocence does not find near so much protection as guilt.

Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.

I think there’s an element in Milady where she sees her own innocence in D’Artagnan.

This is the way of the world I thought in my innocence, round and around the layers of peel until the taste becomes certain.