Roland Barthes Quotes

An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.

Get yourself in that intense state of being next to madness. Keep yourself in, not necessarily a frenzied state, but in a state of great intensity. The kind of state you would be in before going to bed with your partner. That heightened state when you're in a carnal embrace: time stops and nothing else matters. You should always write with an erection. Even if you're a woman.

It is certainly very hard to write about sex in English without making it unattractive.

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

There's not much you can do about time - it just keeps on passing. But experience? Don't tell me that. I'm not proud of it, but I don't have any sexual desire. And what sort of experience can a writer have if she doesn't feel passion? It'd be like a chef without an appetite.

To call that writing, madam, is an insult to quills and ink across the world.

This desire [to write] is rather strange all the same and is not without a certain "cracked" quality.

You can only write, 'Somebody wants something, something else is in their way of getting it.'

The shorter and the plainer the better.

It's not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don't take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you're trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There's no objective reason why they're right. They just sound right to me.

The pen is the language of the soul; as the concepts that in it are generated, such will be its writings.

What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.

The last thing I have to say is that ice is the past tense of water. I've always wanted to write that sentence and now I have.

I'm writing, I'm using language, I'm using that language to tell stories and even more so to get ideas across. And I just love that, and I've always loved that.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

It's really fun to write cuss words. Just in general.

To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.

What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world.

I have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple; there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth -\-\ for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity.

When you consider what you would love to accomplish in your life but feel ill-prepared to bring it about, picture the eighty-nine Michelangelo living five centuries ago, painting, sculpting, and writing. Imagine he is telling you that you can create whatever you desire, and the great danger is not in having too much hope, but in reaching what you have perceived as hopeless.

All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

Make me a willow cabin at your gate, And call upon my soul within the house; Write loyal cantons of contemned love And sing them loud even in the dead of night.