338 Quotes by Roland Barthes

The modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.

True wrestling, wrong called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema.

This book has two determinants: on the one hand, an ideological critique of the language of so-called mass culture; on the other, an initial semiological dismantling of that language: I had just read Saussure and emerged with the conviction that by treating “collective representations” as sign systems one might hope to transcend pious denunciation and instead account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit bourgeois culture into a universal nature.

Myth, on the contrary, is a language which does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it its sustenance an insidious, degraded survival, it provokes in them an artificial reprieve in which it settles comfortably, it turns them into speaking corpses.

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

Robar a un hombre su lenguaje en nombre del propio lenguaje: todos los crímenes legales comienzan así.

Dandyism […] is not only an ethos (on which much has been written since Baudelaire and Barbey) but also a technique. It is these two together which make a dandy, and it is obviously the latter which guarantees the former, as with all ascetic philosophies (of the Hindu type, for example) in which a physical form of behaviour acts as a route towards the performance of thought […]

La notoriété est la première forme de la naturalisation.

Am I in love? - Yes, since I'm waiting." The other 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: I am the one who waits.