From the untitled interview in Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 3:

"To become a bourgeois intellectual, a professor, a journalist, a writer, or anything of that sort seemed repugnant. The experience of the war had shown us the urgent need of a society radically different from the one in which we were living, this society that had permitted Nazism, that had lain down in front of it, and that had gone over en masse to de Gaulle. A large sector of French youth had a reaction of total disgust toward all that. We wanted a world and a society that were not only different but that would be an alternative version of ourselves: we wanted to be completely other in a completely different world."

"I don't regard myself as a philosopher. What I do is neither a way of doing philosophy nor a way of discouraging others from doing philosophy. ... I make use of the most conventional methods: demonstration, or, at any rate, proof in historical matters, textual references, citation of authorities ... There is nothing original in what I do. ... In spite of that, people who read me—particularly those who value what I do—often tell me with a laugh, 'You know very well that what you say is really just fiction.' I always reply, 'Of course, there's no question of it being anything else but fiction.'

"If I had really wanted, for example, to do the history of psychiatric institutions in Europe between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, obviously I wouldn't have written a book like Madness and Civilization. But my problem is not to satisfy professional historians; my problem is to construct myself, and to invite others to share an experience of what we are, not only our past but also our present, an experience of our modernity in such a way that we might come out of it transformed. ... [Madness and Civilization], for me—and for those who read it and used it—constituted a transformation in the historical, theoretical, and moral or ethical relationship we have with madness, the mentally ill, the psychiatric institution, and the very truth of psychiatric discourse. So it's a book that functions as an experience, for its writer and reader alike, much more than as the establishment of a historical truth. ... The essential thing is not in the series of those true or historically verifiable findings but, rather, in the experience that the book makes possible."

"I haven't written a single book that was not inspired, at least in part, by a direct personal experience. I've had a complex personal relationship with madness and with the psychiatric institution. ... The same is true of prison and sexuality, for different reasons."

"I only began to write [Discipline and Punish] after having participated for several years in working groups that were thinking about and struggling against penal institutions. This was a complicated, difficult work carried out in association with prisoners, their families, prison staff, magistrates, and others.

"When the book came out, different readers—in particular, correctional officers, social workers, and so on—delivered this peculiar judgment: 'The book is paralyzing. It may contain some correct observations, but it has clear limits, because it impedes us; it prevents us from going on with our activity.' My reply is that this very reaction proves that the work was successful, that it functioned just as I intended."