'Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east, and west is west, and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.'
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)