Now literature is only a means, devoid of cause and purpose; in fact, that is what defines it. You can of course attempt a sociology of the literary institution; but you can limit to act of writing by neither a why nor a wherefore. ... To ask oneself why one writes is already an advance over the blissful unconsciousness of "inspiration," but it is a despairing advance -- there is no answer. Apart from demand and apart from success, empirical alibis much more than real motives, the literary act is without cause and without goal precisely because it is devoid of sanction: it proposes itself to the world without any praxis establishing or justifying it: it is an absolutely intransitive act, it modifies nothing, nothing reassures it.
-Roland Barthes, "Kafka's Answer," Critical Essays (NWU Press, 1972).