Quotaions about literature...Help Please!!!!!?

Question

“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
-- C.S. Lewis

“The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.”
-- Margaret Atwood

“The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.”

“Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.”
-- Francoise Sagan

“Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.”
-- Thornton Wilder

What do all these mean? Just want to know everyone else's opinions

Answer 1

These are pretty easy to understand. You simply need to think about each one for a minute. C.S. Lewis is saying that literature does not simply copy things from life but that reading literature will increase your understanding of life. In other words, literature will not simply entertain you but it will also educate you.

Margaret Atwood is saying that literature means different things to different people. Not everyone benefits in exactly the same way even from the same book. What you understand from a book depends on what types of things you want to learn, from that book.

Sagan is saying that literature is not pointless and unstructured even though life is often that way and literature does refer to life and is even a part of life.

Thornton Wilder was a comic writer. He is looking at the funny side of writing. Basically, he is saying that literature is nothing but a collection of things that people have already said before, thousands of times and everybody knows those things to be true.