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The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

Roland Barthes

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Roland Barthes
Age: 64 †
Born: 1915
Born: November 12
Died: 1980
Died: March 25
Diarist
Essayist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Literary Theorist
Mythographer
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Roland Gérard Barthes
Author
Begins
Death
Writing
Enters

More quotes by Roland Barthes

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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 (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.
Roland Barthes
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Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.
Roland Barthes
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For the theatre one needs long arms it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.
Roland Barthes
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To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
Roland Barthes
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The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.
Roland Barthes
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To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
Roland Barthes
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For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: 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.
Roland Barthes
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I encounter millions of bodies in my life of these millions, I may desire some hundreds but of these hundreds, I love only one.
Roland Barthes
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Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
Roland Barthes
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Why is it better to last than to burn?
Roland Barthes
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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.
Roland Barthes
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The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.
Roland Barthes
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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
Roland Barthes
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There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of one's good conscience. And then there is a liberalism which is more ethical than political one would have to find another name for this. Something like a profound suspension of judgment.
Roland Barthes
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Language is neither reactionary nor progressive it is quite simply fascist for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
Roland Barthes
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Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
Roland Barthes
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What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
Roland Barthes
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Literature is the question minus the answer.
Roland Barthes
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In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
Roland Barthes
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What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
Roland Barthes