Roland Barthes Quotes

Literature is the question minus the answer.

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

All good Literature rests primarily on insight.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It's a story.

When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let's Pretend, it's often easy to see symbolism where none exists.

Like all writers, I draw from life as I know it; but it's a refracted kind of reality, and none of it is factually true.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever.

Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.

Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

A book can be wonderful and powerful and accessible and artful all at the same time.

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.