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"Literature is the question minus the answer."
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"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."
"Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth."
"Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. - It is not fair. - He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. - I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it - but fear I must."
"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."
"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"
"In our Impulsive nature to write and repulsive nature to read that has led to a decline in literary genius in our times!"
"You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women."
"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."
"Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives."
"Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?"
Explore more quotes by Roland Barthes
"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."
"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."
"The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man."
"What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth."
"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."
"Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive."
"The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning."
"The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!"
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