Roland Barthes Quotes

The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

Writing was in its origin, the voice of an absent person.

As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.

As fascinated as I was by words on paper, it was matched by my fascination with words in people's mouths. The spoken word. And that is the world of theatre.

I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.

Long before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.

There's something, I think, that gets lost when we write something - something gets lost in the translation. So I speak everything out, and it's more important how it sounds. And applying that to more formal aspects of writing.

Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic.

Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything.

Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen.

Writers are the ones who figure out how to put their observations into words.

Writing and telling are almost the same, the way I do it.

My people have called upon me to speak to you. The red man has no books, and when he wishes to make known his views...like his father before him...he speaks with his mouth. He is afraid of writing. When he speaks he knows what he says; the Great Spirit hears him. Writing is the invention of the pale faces;

Achilles exists only through Homer . Take away the art of writing from this world , and you will probably take away its glory .

All people in the world - who are not hermits or mutes - speak words. They speak different languages, but they speak words. They say, "How are you" or "I'm not feeling well" all over the world. These common words - these common elements that we have between us - the writer has to take some verbs and nouns and pronouns and adjectives and adverbs and arrange them in a way that sound fresh.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

I come from a tradition - from the Jewish tradition, which believes in words, in language, in communication.

I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory. They are more made to be spoken than to be read.

There is a form of literature that is a deed, and a form that is only talk, and the latter passes away like a conversation.

For people who are coming out of an oral tradition, it is very exciting to get into reading and writing and it is quite interesting how frequently people want to write their own story. Sometimes it is straight history - this is how we came about, how our town was created, a lot of that kind of effort, as soon as literacy came. The first thing you wanted to do was to put something down about who you are or how you are related to you neighbors. Then the next stage would be the stories, the cultural part of the story: this is the kind of world our ancestors made or aspired to.

My family is filled with wonderful storytellers. I lack their gift of gab, so it's a relief to be able to write.