What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.
Quotes by Roland Barthes
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive . . . and impoverished.
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
The photographic image . . . is a message without a code.
Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
Literature is the question minus the answer.
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.
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.
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.









