Life has no real shape or form to it, but literature does. Literature is throwing away its one distinctive quality when it tries to imitate life. Realism [the literary style] does not create but can only record things on a sub-creative level. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of life.
“
| — |
Paraphrased from Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying, via Northrop Frye |
