I'd rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots.

San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled--or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? Did we anticipate the ways in which, vivid and continuous, they would unsuit us for the business of daily life? Or should our notion of daily life itself be transformed?

The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.

The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.

Hell is God's Absence.

Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.

What is new about Barthes's posthumous reputation is the view of him as a writer whose books of criticism and personal musings must be admired as serious and beautiful works of the imagination.