“ I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing. Roland Barthes
“ Paradoxically (since people say: Work, amuse yourself, see friends) it’s when we’re busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude makes us less miserable. Roland Barthes
“ Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die. Roland Barthes
“ Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes. Roland Barthes
“ I experience reality as a system of power. Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, Rome on a holiday, everything imposes on me its system of being; everyone is *badly behaved*. Isn't their impoliteness… Roland Barthes
“ So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, once my bad temper is exhausted, I have no language left at all: the world is not "unreal" (I could… Roland Barthes
“ ...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothi… Roland Barthes
“ For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: came… Roland Barthes
“ To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing… Roland Barthes
“ The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise:… Roland Barthes
“ Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither he nor she; the other has only a name of his own, or her own name. The third-person pronoun is… Roland Barthes
“ (Love’s atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimately* it is possible to talk about love only *according to a strict allocutive determination*; whether… Roland Barthes
“ You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curta… Roland Barthes
