Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafkawas a German-language writer of novels and short stories who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isolated protagonists faced by bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible social-bureaucratic powers, and has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include "Die Verwandlung", Der Process, and Das Schloss. The term Kafkaesque has entered the English...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 July 1883
CityPrague, Czech Republic
Writing [is] a form of prayer.
This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer.
Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward.
The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.
My life was sweeter than other people's and my death will be more terrible by the same degree.
The cruelty of death lies in the fact that it brings the real sorrow of the end, but not the end. The greatest cruelty of death: an apparent end causes a real sorrow. Our salvation is death, but not this one.
One reads in order to ask questions
There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.
There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.
Either the world is so tiny or we are enormous; in either case, we fill it completely.
Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.
To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.
The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment.