Writer speaks a stench. - Franz Kafka

"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."

"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."

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

"The meaning of life is that it stops."