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
By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.
I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.
My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.
He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.
All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.
I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.
Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
Writing means revealing oneself to excess.
Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being.
Isolation is a way to know ourselves.
It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.
Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.
Only the moment counts. It determines life.
Writers speak stench.