"No, imbeciles! No! Fools and cretins, a book will not make a plate of soup; a novel is not a pair of boots; a sonnet is not a syringe; a drama is not a railway - those forms of civilization which have caused humanity to march on the road to progress.
By all the bowels of all the popes, past, present and future, no! Ten thousand times no!
You cannot make a hat out of a metonymy, and you cannot make a simile in the form of a bedroom slipper, and you cannot use an antithesis as an umbrella [...] An ode is, I have a feeling, too light a garment for the winter."

--Théophile Gautier, Preface (1834) to Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/quotations/quotations_by_ib.html