Roland Barthes Quotes

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

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.

How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Every exploration is an appropriation.

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

...language is never innocent.

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

Every photograph is a certificate of presence.

Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.

To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.