Franz Kafka

Paths are made by walking.

The meaning of life is that it stops.

He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.

L'éternité, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

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.

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

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.

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.