Literature is the question minus the answer.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not.
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.
Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.
Calling one thing 'literature' and another 'fiction' is a way to create status where there is none.
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
The writer studies literature, not the world.