The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge.

Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.

People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.

Where there is power, there is resistance.

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations

Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.

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.

Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?

I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.

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.

I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does.

You were wrong, Gram, " I said softly, tone emotionless because I was resigned to the awful, lonely truth of it. "Love doesn't save our souls. It kills them.

A healthy attitude is contagious

For the analyst it is a source of never-ending astonishment how comparatively well a person can function with the core of himself not participating.

Reality has no inside, outside, or middle part.

Poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes.

Find me any performer anywhere who isn't egocentric. You'd better believe you're good, or you've got no business being out there.

Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.

I worshipped Berry Gordy for the creative dreams he had made come true.

The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.