Franz Kafka

"Kill me, or you are a murderer."

"May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air."

"Books are a narcotic."

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

"Writing is prayer."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."