Quotes By Author: Franz Kafka

“But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?”

“One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate.”

“What is written is merely the dregs of experience.”

“Writer speaks a stench.”

“Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue.”

“Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.”

“Writing is prayer.”

“Kill me, or you are a murderer.”

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

“I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.”

“Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.”

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

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”

“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.”

“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.”