Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

To know how to live is my trade and my art.

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.

A cat can be trusted to purr when she is pleased, which is more than can be said for human beings.