"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 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."
"Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me."
"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]"
"Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith."