Franz Kafka's quote

Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was an influential German-language author of novels and short stories who is regarded by leading critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. The term "Kafkaesque" has entered the English language to describe surreal situations reminiscent of those in his writing.

프란츠 카프카 (ko)

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

If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? ... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.

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.

I am free and that is why I am lost.

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.

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

Books are a narcotic.

The meaning of life is that it stops.

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

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

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

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