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
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.
I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.
Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.
There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.
The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.
People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.
Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.
Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.
I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?
I am a cage, in search of a bird.