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
Kill me, or you are a murderer.
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.
All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.
Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
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.
I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.
Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.
It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.
The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.