(…) François Le Lionnais wrote: Every literary work begins with an inspiration… which must accommodate itself as well as possible to a series of constraints and procedures, etc. What the Oulipo intended to demonstrate was that these constraints are felicitous, generous, and are in fact literature itself. What it proposed was to discover new ones, under the name of structures. But at that time, we didn’t formulate this as clearly.
— Lescure, Jean. “Brief History of the Oulipo.” The New Media Reader. 1973. Eds. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Nick Montfort. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003. 172-76.
