Roland Barthes Quotes

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.

If you want to express yourself, you need the services of a lover or a psychiatrist; if you want to express a book, you might conceivably manage it.

My songs are just little letters to me.

I was always the observer, trying to understand what was going on. I was always the new kid. Writing became my safe place.

At school, I was always daydreaming and fiddling in inkwells, but I had to learn to grow up and become articulate. And doing that was what brought me into writing songs. It's like therapy for me, because it exposes what I'm really thinking.

Good things will come from self-expression.

I've always felt an overwhelming need to get out what was inside. The vehicle for me was words on paper - not speech, not art, not dance, not anything else.

My only way of processing anything for me is by writing.

It's just hard," Harry said finally, in a low voice, "to realize he won't write me again

I do these records. All of these ideas that I have, that I put out there, that inspire me to write, are a purging in a lot of ways. I have to expel them in order for myself to walk around and actually smile and be a regular, or a living, person.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

...I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.

When people say they write for themselves, that's probably what they do. I will admit that I don't write for myself; I write to be read. I've got the reader in my mind all the time.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

I see myself as someone who's been saved by writing. God knows what I would have been, become or how I would have ended up without it.

I need to write to be happy.

Music is about expressing things you can't in everyday life.

Anyone who has problems, or worries, anyone who laughs and cries, anyone who feels can write. It's only talking on paper... talking about the things that matter to us.

When we put the pen to paper, we articulate things in our life that we may have felt vague about. Before you write about something, somebody says, 'How do you feel?' and you say, 'Oh, I feel okay.' Then you write about it, and you discover you don't feel okay.

It was not cool to be that fun, bubbly kid, so I would just go off on my own and sing and make up songs, and that's how I think I developed into the kind of artist and writer that I am.

My music is the most 'me' thing about me. Everything is in my music.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.