Roland Barthes

We know that a language is a corpus of prescriptions and habits common to all writers of a period. Which means that a language is a kind of natural ambience wholly pervading the writer’s expression, yet without endowing it with form or content: it is, as it were, an abstract circle of truths outside of which alone the solid residue of an individual logos begins to settle. It enfolds the whole of literary creation much as the earth, the sky, and the line where they meet outline a familiar habitat for mankind. It is not so much a stock of materials as a horizon, which implies both a boundary and a perspective; in short, it is the comforting area of an ordered space. The writer literally takes nothing from it; a language is for him rather a frontier, to overstep which alone might lead to the linguistically supernatural; it is a field of action, the definition of, and hope for, a possibility.

-from Writing Degree Zero