Roland Barthes Quotes

As for the discipline, we [me and Frank Moore Cross] belong to two different disciplines. One involves research and archaeological materials. Mine is more interpretive. But it is the love for the text that is there, and that is what makes the whole adventure of reading and studying and sharing worthwhile.

There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day.

To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

I read, therefore I'm interested in writers.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.

Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.

Our amended Constitution is the lodestar for our aspirations. Like every text worth reading, it is not crystalline. The phrasing is broad and the limitations of its provisions are not clearly marked. Its majestic generalities and ennobling pronouncements are both luminous and obscure. This ambiguity of course calls forth interpretation, the interaction of reader and text. The encounter with the Constitutional text has been, in many senses, my life's work.

In working towards ways of reading Mann, so that his own advances in suggesting new perspectives will become more vivid, I do some fairly standard philosophical analysis of ideas in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

...I will continue to underscore that I don't think authorial intent is all that important to a reading experience, and I certainly don't think the job of reading is to divine authorial intent.

Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.

Deconstruction glorifies the critic, humiliates the author, and makes the reader wonder why he bothered.

Every text assumes a reader.

The great thing about literature is that you're making up your own interpretation of the character anyway. Also, you're given basically a bible of who a character is and you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot if you're not reading it.

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.

It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.

writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.

What on earth is modern exegesis up to? Oh, little lazy one! Some red wine and up! Off you go, brandishing your fork, stripped of Ophelia's useless ornaments, fire in your large nostrils, out to rake the muck of metaphors.