Franz Kafka — "I can choose to be an animal, a plant, a stone, a star; it is all the same to me…"

"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?"

"I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, and I think differently from what I ought to think. And so it all proceeds into deepest darkness."

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

"What is important is to be able to stand on one's own feet, to be able to say 'I'."

"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."