on the desire to make something of literature

The Naturalists were hatmakers who made a plaster cast of the human head and left it at that. Art for art's sake consisted in making hats for the hat museum. The experimental poets exhausted themselves fabricating perfectly unwearable headgear. Political literature thought the thing to do was to stick little red flags or tricolors into old caps or berets.
The thing is to do, and to do well, something worth doing. A sturdy, beautiful hat, for example.
And the work of art, even as it is that, is also for that very reason a magic hat that fits every head, each according to its capacities; and it gives strength and valor to everyone who puts it on.
- Raymond Queneau, "What Is Art?" (1938)