Franz Kafka

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"Books are a narcotic."

"Writer speaks a stench."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things."

"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."

"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."

"The meaning of life is that it stops."

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