Michel Foucault Quotes

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.'

I was really grateful to have a chance to have some really in-depth study about the power of language using a philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago by the name of Paul Ricoeur. I'm really happy to be in Chicago because a lot of what I do is rooted in his approach to language.

There is nothing outside the text

The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things.

The way we make sense of a realistic text is through the same broad ideological frame as the way we make sense of our social experience or rather, the way we are made sense of by the discourses of our culture.

I think what matters most in literary work is the context, not the text.

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings.

For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I think literary theory satisfied a deep love I have for big, encompassing narratives about the world and how it works - which are usually, in the end, more creative visions unto themselves than illuminating explanations.

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Deconstruction: peering suspiciously at the text, I wait for it to make a slip and betray itself.

Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.

A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to literature and theory. I wish I could have more of that in life, but I don't because I'm always reading scripts or things to prepare for movies when I'm reading.

Every interpretation is but an introduction to another interpretation, and that is how Talmud pages are printed.

[The Bible] has to be interpreted. And if it isn’t interpreted, then it can’t be put into action. So if we are serious about following God, then we have to interpret the Bible. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says. We must first make decisions about what it means at this time, in this place, for these people.