338 Quotes by Roland Barthes

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.

What the Journal posits is not the tragic question, the Madman's question: "Who am I?", but the comic question, the Bewildered Man's question: "Am I?" A comic --a comedian, that's what the Journal keeper is.

I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.

Very often (too often in my view) I was aware of being photographed. So, from the moment I feel I am in the camera's eye, everything changes: I begin to pose, I immediately create a different body, I change even before the image.

Why is it better to last than to burn?

Inexpressible Love:To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love, to know that writing compensates for nothing..

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

Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.