'If you meditate on your past sins long enough, you can get lost in your sins and not know what your virtues are. Why not meditate on the virtues? Foster the virtues and let the sins fall off.'
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
From The Death of the Author (1968) by Roland Barthes (1915-1980)