I Searched for a Missing Citation, And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!

At the bottom of a rabbit hole, an unsurprising villain

FYI: I’m offering 25% paid subscriptions off until the end of November. The following is an adapted and expanded excerpt from a talk I gave at Washington University earlier this month.

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Last month while I was writing a lecture about distractions, I became intensely distracted by trying to confirm a quote I first encountered as one of many epigraphs in the excellent (if sometimes vexing) book, The Midnight Disease.

The epigraph read:

“A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

—Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero

I thought it sounded like a strange thing to be attributed to Barthes for several reasons, though I am not really a fan or student of Barthes, however—in what was certainly a distraction from writing the talk about distractions— I was suddenly determined to understand the context of this line, so I read an entire PDF of Writing Degree Zero.

I did not find the line or anything like it.

So I started trying to find mentions of this line elsewhere on the internet, which at first only deepened my frustration. All over the place, this line was quoted verbatim, and the only attribution was to the book I had just read, in which it was not.

Reluctantly, I took to Instagram and Bluesky, calling for any theory nerds out there to help me solve this quandary; I didn’t think anyone would have an answer, and at first I heard some of the same things I thought—

1. That it didn’t sound like Barthes.

2. That the French don’t have a French term for “creative writers.”

3. That it must have been a bad translation.

4. That it sounded more like a quote usually attributed to Thomas Mann: "A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” Which isn’t such a bad sentiment, but I also couldn’t find a reputable source for that quote either and by then I was starting to go mildly nuts.¹

One of the many things that frustrated me about the original fake Barthes quote— “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem” —is that without any greater context, the statement glamorizes the struggles inherent in writing, suggests some addictive nature in the process, and implies that if writing is something that you enjoy then you are not a Real Writer.

See? Because Barthes said it had to be a problem for you.

Writers will have easier and more difficult moments with their work, the same as all people have with all forms of work and the extent to which writing is depicted, often by writers, as some kind of noble suffering is a tic of the profession that I find frustrating, inaccurate, performative, and stupid.

Anyway, more than one French speaker on Instagram sent me links to the book from which they assumed this bad translation had originated, Critique et vérité, though I don’t speak French and couldn’t find an official English translation online.

But then! I was contacted by the “Barthes Studies” account on Bluesky (omg!) and in fact, this line is a great annoyance to them, a totally inaccurate condensation of a sentence from the English translation of Critique et vérité (Criticism and Truth.) The real quote really has nothing to do with being a creative writer at all, except in the fact that someone took a few very creative liberties with their translation and attribution.

The real English translation is:

“A writer is someone for whom language constitutes a problem, who is aware of the depth of language, not its instrumentality or its beauty.”

—Roland Barthes, Criticism & Truth, Translated and Edited by Katrine Pilcher Keuneman, pg 23-24

Notice how whomever bastardized this line replaced the word “language” with the word “writing.” They are distinctly not interchangeable words, especially in the world of Barthes. Furthermore, the line belongs to a section of the book in which he is examining the possibility that there is no difference between novelists and poets on the one hand (categories American readers might call creative writers), and critics and nonfiction writers on the other hand.

There are two lessons in my stupid wormhole. First—

RESPECT THE WORK OF TRANSLATORS.

I realize this is not a particularly ground-breaking statement on my niche Substack email, but perhaps we need to carry this message further out into the culture, as AI and anti-intellectualism creep in at the margins. And secondly—

Do not use epigraphs from books you have not read.

In fact, perhaps we should all question our desire to use epigraphs at all, as they often seem like nervous throat clearing on the part of the writer, or at attempt to elevate ones work to the de-contextualized line at hand, which, like an inside joke, often fails to deliver anything to the reader. (And don’t get me started on using multiple epigraphs, or epigraphs for every chapter or essay a book. I love you nerds, but please get a life.)

However I was still left with one question— who was the culprit for sending this fake Barthes quote out into the culture to proliferate on stupid quotation websites and get used as epigraphs in otherwise great books?

My friend Megan did some internet sleuthing and found that the first mention of this fake quote online was the work of none other than Jonah Lerher in 2010 on a New York Times blog. (Remember when they had “blogs” that were somehow distinct from the rest of the paper? Do they still? Do I care?)

Jonah Lehrer, Jonah Fucking Lehrer, the former Wunderkind of Plagiarism. Once a young hotshot journalist and author, un petit Malcolm Gladwell, Lehrer was dethroned when it was revealed he’d made up quotes from Bob Dylan and blatantly and repeatedly been plagiarizing his work. One of his books taken off the market and pulped and he went from best seller to J-school punchline in record time. (More recently he’s come back to repent by writing an apparently underwhelming book about love.)

Sadly, though, this did not solve it. As readily as I put the blame on Lehrer, he is probably only partially responsible for the fake Barthes quote festering online; The Midnight Disease, the book where I first came across the irritating line, came out six years before his post. Where author and neurologist Alice Flaherty came across the false line is anyone’s guess, and I am simply too tired to continue avenging erroneous quotes.

Here’s Barthes on a beach:

Barthes & co on a beach. Via (of course) the Barthes Studies Bluesky account.

1. Callie & Jean Garnett, the publishing twins, recently brought the source of Tomas Mann quote to my attention: