Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer based in Prague, who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic.
Franz Kafka Quotes
We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
—Franz Kafka
All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.
—Franz Kafka
Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.
—Franz Kafka
May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
—Franz Kafka
Most men are not wicked.. They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.
—Franz Kafka
In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.
—Franz Kafka
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
—Franz Kafka
How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense.
—Franz Kafka
I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.
—Franz Kafka
I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.
—Franz Kafka
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
—Franz Kafka
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
—Franz Kafka
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
—Franz Kafka
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
—Franz Kafka