Not quite a natural pessimist, but always looking for things to convince me to be optimistic. I write very little, simply because having read certain amazing books can be dissuasive...

My favourite writers:
Albert Camus
Jorge Luis Borges 
Italo Calvino
David Foster Wallace
Anthony Powell
and a great many more.

Some of Italo Calvino's definitions of 'classic' literature (from Why Read The Classics?, 1991):
- The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual's or the collective unconscious.
- A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
- A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.
- The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the languages and customs) through which they have passed.
- A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.
- Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected and innovative we find them when we actually read them.
- A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.
- 'Your' classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.
- A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.
- A classic is a work which persists as background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.