top of page
Exlpore more Books quotes

"Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away."

"A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat."

"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."

"I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don't know."

"Some books mirror reality while others are entirely fantasy. My favorite are those that manage to weave both into a world."
Explore more quotes by Roland Barthes


"What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth."


"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire."


"I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun."


"Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it."


"For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture."


"I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient."


"To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished."
bottom of page