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Michel Foucault Quotes about Writing

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If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is

If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.

Michel Foucault
Book, Writing, Thinking
Source: www.nicklewis.org

I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.

Michel Foucault
Book, Writing, Finals

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.

Michel Foucault
Writing, Who I Am, Order

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. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.

Michel Foucault
Love, Book, Writing
"Truth, Power, Self". Interview with Rux Martin (October 25, 1982) as quoted in "Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault", book edited by ‎Luther H. Martin,‎ Huck Gutman and‎ Patrick H. Hutton, January 7, 1988.

[Raymond Roussel] said that after his first book he expected that the next morning there would be a kind of aura around his person and that everyone in the street would be able to see that he had written a book. This is the obscure desire harboured by everyone who writes. It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor because one is what one is: one writes to become other than what one is. One tries to modify one's way of being through the act of writing.

Michel Foucault
Morning, Book, Writing

In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.

Michel Foucault
Writing, Creating, Space
Michel Foucault (1998). “Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology”, p.206, The New Press

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

Michel Foucault
Writing, Who I Am, Order
Michel Foucault, Jeremy Carrette (2013). “Religion and Culture”, p.13, Routledge

During the years 1945-1965 (I am referring to Europe), there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of politicaldiscourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one's dreams stray too far from Freud.... These were therequirements that made the strange occupation of writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one's time acceptable.

Michel Foucault
Dream, Writing, Thinking

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