The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

Singer frames literature as a perpetual struggle between opposed forces: feeling versus reason, vitality versus mortality. The “war” suggests that great writing is energized by tension rather than harmony—art becomes compelling when it holds intellect and emotion in dynamic balance. His warning against the “too intellectual” points to a kind of aesthetic aridity: when a work privileges ideas, technique, or abstraction while neglecting desire, fear, love, and other passions, it may become clever but lifeless. The remark also aligns with Singer’s broader defense of storytelling rooted in human appetite and moral drama, where thought matters most when it is tested by lived experience.