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
What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.
I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.
"Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said.
If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.
Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.
One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.
I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.
Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man.
The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.
Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn't make it true.
Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.
If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.
Evil is whatever distracts.