Franz Kafka

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

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

"The meaning of life is that it stops."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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