In primitive societies, narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman, or speaker, whose "performance" may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative code), but not his "genius."

Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author"

Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never use your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon in the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

It is not the irreversible I discover in my childhood, it is the irreducible: everything which is still in me, by fits and starts; in the child, I read quite openly the dark underside of myself boredom, vulnerability, disposition to despairs (in the plural, unfortunately), inward excitement, cut off (unfortunately) from all expression.

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

In an author's lexicon, will there not always be a word-as-manna, a word whose ardent, complex, ineffable, and somehow sacred signification gives the illusion that by this word one might answer for everything. Such a word is neither eccentric nor central; it is motionless and carried, floating, never pigeonholed, always signifier taking up the place of every signified. This word has gradually appeared in his work; at first it was masked by the instance of Truth (that of history), then by that of Validity (that of systems and structures); now it blossoms, it flourishes. . . .

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

Has not writing been for centuries the acknowledgment of a debt, the guarantee of an exchange, the signs of a representation? But today writing gradually drifts toward the cessation of bourgeois debts, toward perversion, the extremity of meaning, the text.

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes