Franz Kafka

"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self."

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

"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."

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

"L'éternité, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin."

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

"Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."

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

"From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back."

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us."

"I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man."

"Writing is prayer."

"Books are a narcotic."

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

"The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies."

"The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies."

"We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt."

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

"The meaning of life is that it stops."

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