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
If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)
It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.
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.
There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.
If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?
If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.
If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.
One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.
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!