“We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.”

All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy-the form of state suited to capitalism-and to the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities.

If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it’s narcissistic. You don’t connect with the other, you take what pleasure you want from them.

To believe that the intolerable crime is to burn a few cars and rob some shops, whereas to kill a young man is trivial, is typically in keeping with what Marx regarded as the principal alienation of capitalism: the primacy of things over existence, of commodities over life and machines over workers

These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television.

We have the riots we deserve.

Love is not a contract between two narcissists.

What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.

The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

The ethic of truth is the complete opposite of an ‘ethics of communication’. It is an ethic of the Real The ethic of truth is absolutely opposed to opinion, and to ethics in general.

I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics…that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid.

Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).

It is thus quite simply false that whereof one cannot speak (in the sense of ‘there is nothing to say about it that specifies it and grants it separating properties’), thereof one must be silent.

What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one?

let us call it thus, is considered to be archaic or old-fashioned, as though in a way there existed no other definition of what it means to be modern than.

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history.

It must on the contrary be named.

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

I could easily have decided that life was cruel, that being black meant everything was stacked against me.

It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.

If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.

The looks, the stares, the giggles . . . I wanted to show everybody that I could do better and also that I could read.

I want – I want – I want – was all that she could think about – but just what this real want was she did not know.

If a man could but be turned about, he would see at once God and himself and the All.

Madonna wasn’t an acrobat or anything, but the sex was good. I could tell she liked it.