Franz Kafka

I am a dream, and I am a reality. I am a dream and a reality.

I have nothing in common with myself.

I am a memory that walks.

I have been dead for a long time. I have been dead since I was born.

I am a piece of paper that has been torn up and thrown away.

I am an old man, and I am a young man. I am an old man and a young man.

I am a book that has not been written.

I am a question that has not been answered.

I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.

I am made of literature. I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what's the point of reading it? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need 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 within us.

All I am is literature, and I am not able to be anything else.

Sleep is the most innocent creature and the most, therefore, defenceless. When sleep does not come, it is because I have been too defenceless, too open, too naked to the world.

I have been so completely absorbed by my work, by my literature, that I have not been able to live, to live with people, to live with the world, to live with myself.

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or no eyes.

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't try to make it popular. Don't try to make it like anything else. Instead, let it be your own. A wild, untamed thing.

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

The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.

I am dirty, Felice, I am filthy, and I have to confess it to you. I have written to you so many lies, and have hidden away so much from you.