Strictly speaking, potential literature is everything and everything is potential literature. For the simple reason that anything can be turned into literature. We find the idea in Homer: “That is the gods’ work, spinning threads of death / through the lives of mortal men, / and all to make a song for those to come” (Odyssey). And we find in Nabokov: “The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction.” And nothing else is saying Mallarmé in his famous dictum: “Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.”
—Four Cold Chapters on The Possibility of Literature