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
It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.
Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.
The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving.
Writer speaks a stench.
May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.
In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.
The delights of this life are not its own, but our fear of the ascent into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its own, but our self-torment because of that fear.
The state we find ourselves in is sinful quite independent of guilt.
Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else.
The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.
He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.
We need the books that affect us like a disaster
All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!