It is a mistake to think that books have come to stay. The human race did without them for thousands of years and may decide to do without them again.
“Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh. I don’t think there’s any consecutive moral philosophy in fiction beyond excellence. Acuteness of feeling and velocity have always seemed to me terribly important. People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.”
John Cheever