Franz Kafka

"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."

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

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

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

"He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived."

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

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

"Books are a narcotic."

"I am a cage, in search of a bird."

"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."

"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."

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

"The meaning of life is that it stops."

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

"We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

"Writer speaks a stench."

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

"The meaning of life is that it stops."

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