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
This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer.
Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
Books are a narcotic.
You are free and that is why you are lost
One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
Hesitation before birth. If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.
What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself
His weariness is that of the gladiator after the combat; his work was the whitewashing of a corner in a state official's office
If the French were German in their essence, then how the Germans would admire them!
Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible," she said, "but that alone doesn't make it true
No people sing with such pure voices as those that live in deepest hell; what we take for the song of angels is their song.
Persons who write a 10,000 word document and call it a brief
One must not cheat anybody, not even the world of one's triumph.