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
Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn't make it true.
But eternity is not temporality at a standstill. What is oppressive about the concept of the eternal is the justification, incomprehensible to us, that time must undergo in eternity and the logical conclusion of that, the justification of ourselves as we are.
Knowledge we have. Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it.
I made the remark that I don't avoid people in order to live quietly, but rather in order to be able to die quietly.
Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.
We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
"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.
I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.
One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.
The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.