“Literature is not meant to give answers… it is meant to unsettle, to open questions.”

Source: Everlasting

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 27 : Evolution of a Vestryman
Context: The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so. And in consequence, their love-affairs, their maxims, their so-called natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickedness, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at least of Wilde's old paradox — that life mimicked art — was indisputable. Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word.

As quoted in Henry Ward Beecher: His Life and Work (1887) by J.T. Lloyd, p. 261 http://books.google.com/books?id=MV5DAAAAYAAJ
Other Sourced

Source: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The Vampire Lestat (1985)

Source: The Mark of Athena

Source: Lumina and New Lumina (1969), p. 20

Source: The Haunted Mesa