Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith. - Franz Kafka

"Writer speaks a stench."

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

"Books are a narcotic."

"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 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."