338 Quotes by Roland Barthes

My claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?

[…] printed fashion functions, semiologically speaking, like a true mythology of clothing: it is even because the vestimentary signified is here objectified, thickened, that fashion is mythic. So it is this mythology of clothing (one could also say its utopia) that needs to be the first stage of a vestimentary linguistics.

La sanción del crítico no es el sentido de la obra, sino el sentido de lo que dice sobre ella.

Above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive.

Since I've been taking care of her, the last six months in fact, she was "everything" for me, and I've completely forgotten that I'd written. I was no longer anything but desperately hers.

Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.

Truth to tell, what is invested in the concept is less reality than a certain knowledge of reality; in passing from the meaning to the form, the image loses some knowledge: the better to receive the knowledge in the concept. In actual fact, the knowledge contained in a mythical concept is confused, made of yielding, shapeless associations.