Top 27 Quotes by Jacques Derrida

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.

We are all mediators, translators.

In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.

I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.

I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.

Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.