Top 100 Quotes About Kafka
#1. With the rain falling
surgically against the roof,
I ate a dish of ice cream
that looked like Kafka's hat.
It was a dish of ice cream
tasting like an operating table
with the patient staring
up at the ceiling.
Richard Brautigan
#2. Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.
Padgett Powell
#3. A book should be an action of Breaking the frozen sea within us. Kafka
Barbara Sala
#5. As told by Kafka's close friend Max Brod:
"Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. 'Now at least I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore.' It was the time he turned strictly vegetarian.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#6. A week later he was in Tokyo, his face reflected in an elevator's gold-veined mirror for this three-floor ascent of the aggressively nondescript O My Golly Building. To be admitted to Death Cube K, apparently a Franz Kafka theme bar.
William Gibson
#7. According to Beckett's or Kafka's law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates.
Gilles Deleuze
#8. Just as Josef K, the protagonist of Kafka's 'The Trial,' awoke one day to discover that he had become part of some unfathomable legal carnival, we, too are frequently waking to discover that the rules of the digital game have once again profoundly changed.
Evgeny Morozov
#9. We were aiming for a cross between Kafka and Orwell, which just goes to show how dangerous it can be when your police officers are better read than you are.
Ben Aaronovitch
#10. It was being published, even after his death, that brought Franz Kafka alive: otherwise he would have been just a man who got nowhere with women.
Clive James
#11. Kafka's fiction examines a universe largely unexplored in the literature preceding him, one full of implications that venture into the remote regions of human psychology. It's a universe with different rules than those governing our reality. And there's no map.
Franz Kafka
#12. Kafka said, A book
must be an axe
for the frozen sea
inside us, which sounds
great, but what good
is an axe against
a frozen sea?
Perhaps this is why
he said, while dying,
Destroy everything.
Matt Rasmussen
#13. If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you.
Kafka (note to himself in journal)
Franz Kafka
#15. Yur Karyakin once wrote: 'We should not judge a man's life by his perception of himself. Such a perception may be tragically inadequate.' And I read something in Kafka to the effect that man was irretrievably lost within himself.
Svetlana Alexievich
#16. It is said Somerset Maugham traveled the world with a notebook to learn the essence of life and Kafka sat in a room for the same objective. Yet Kafka came out with a better world-view.
U.R. Ananthamurthy
#17. Kafka thought his stories were hilarious. We don't necessarily have that reaction to them, but he certainly laughed his head off every time he read them out loud.
Margaret Atwood
#18. [on Springsteen's "Stolen Car":] A kind of mystical film noir, written by Kafka and shot by Polanski.
Adam Sweeting
#19. Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing. To the point that I have to be careful that they don't take over.
Alan Lightman
#20. When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
Zadie Smith
#21. I went through a whole phase when I was younger of being obsessed with Tolstoy and Kafka and Camus, all those really, beautiful, dark depressing books.
Jessica Pare
#22. [Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job ... into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
Milan Kundera
#23. I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.
John Banville
#24. I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.
Margaret Atwood
#25. Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [ ... ] because one isn't always equal to oneself.
Primo Levi
#26. Kafka, in everybody's life there's a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can't go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact.
Haruki Murakami
#27. Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning.
Mark Slouka
#28. Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
Leslie Fiedler
#29. Since adolescence I've had a passion for Romantic Fantastique literature, which continued with Expressionism and culminated with the genius of Kafka. It's that German thread of the metaphysic - they were looking for the beyond in dreams.
Dumitru Tepeneag
#30. The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
Milan Kundera
#31. Kafka's inevitable tropism for the allegorical puts him in marked opposition to the realism that dominated the literary world of the first half of the 20th century.
John Kessel
#32. I was first introduced to Kafka's writing during my compulsory army-service basic training. During that period, Kafka's fiction felt hyperrealistic.
Etgar Keret
#33. Franz Kafka wrote, "It isn't necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you." And Kafka was born a century before the Internet!
Austin Kleon
#34. Passionless is vulgar ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka")
William S. Wilson
#35. Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.
Mason Cooley
#36. The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
John Updike
#37. One of the influences of Kafka over later writers is not so much in the content of his work as in its form.
John Kessel
#38. Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.
Manuel Puig
#39. No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women.
Milan Kundera
#40. A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.
Italo Svevo
#41. And knew without doubt that I was living in a story Kafka would have been proud to write.
Lucy Grealy
#42. Writing letters ... means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.
[Kafka to Milena]
Kafka, Franz
#43. I do hang out with girls, I do relax. But I am a hermit sometimes and get a bit too introverted, too 'Jean-Paul Sartre' and intellectual in my head. And it's like a Kafka novel in there, things get nuts. Then I have to remind myself to get out and I will go and play ice hockey with my friends.
Josh Peck
#44. We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.
Cornel West
#45. No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.
Eugenio Montale
#46. A friend of mine that I was in a band with started me on Kafka, which in turn led to Camus and Sartre.
Craig Ferguson
#47. Kafka saw his tuberculosis as a liberation; interestingly, he called it "the animal.
Franz Kafka
#48. My views about the safety of Jews in the world have not been changed by the work on the Dreyfus affair or, for that matter, by the work I did on Franz Kafka for the book on him I published a year before the Dreyfus book appeared.
Louis Begley
#49. What Kafka said: I write to close my eyes.
Jenny Offill
#50. Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, "The meaning of life is that it ends." Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.
Caitlin Doughty
#51. Authors I've longed to write like - but realize I actually can't even begin to - include Poe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Daniil Kharms, Witold Gombrowicz, Emily Dickinson, Robert Walser, Barbara Comyns, Ntozake Shange, Camille Laurens, Zbigniew Herbert, and Jose Saramago.
Helen Oyeyemi
#52. If anything, his parables guarantee the failure not only of his characters, but of readers wishing to abstract any lessons applicable to their own lives. Failure, it seems, is Kafka's true subject.
Franz Kafka
#53. Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level.
Manuel Puig
#54. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the head, why bother reading it in the first place? ... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka in a letter to Oskar Pollak dated January 27, 1904
Franz Kafka
#55. In the summer of 1913, Kafka bangs endlessly on about 'necessity,' that favorite concept of every German since Hegel who ever planned to do something morally dubious.
James Hawes
#56. There are two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness." Franz Kafka
Jason Harvey
#57. If Franz Kafka were alive today he'd be writing about customer service.
Jonathan Alter
#58. The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.
Franz Kafka
#59. Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.
David Foster Wallace
#60. No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
David Foster Wallace
#61. all of the great writers drank, except for Kafka and Nietzsche, neither of whom you exactly wanted to be when you grew up.
Anne Lamott
#62. Your self-esteem is a notch below Kafka.
Woody Allen
#64. Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.
Milan Kundera
#65. In view of the fact that I surround myself with numbskulls now, I shall die among numbskulls, and on my deathbed shall be surrounded by numbskulls who will not understand what I am saying ... Whom am I sleeping with these days ? Franz Kafka.
Patricia Highsmith
#66. She tells everyone she's an introvert." Cordelia sniffed. "It's a sad, psychological malady. Comes from reading way too much Kafka.
Ellen Hart
#67. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" asked "That if Franz Kafka were here his head would explode?"
"Actually, yeah.
David Wong
#68. Herr Kafka, essen Sie keine Eier." (As one and only piece of dialog K recalls from his meeting with Rudolf Steiner - "Mr. Kafka don't eat eggs.
Franz Kafka
#69. An information bureau of the human condition, Theodor Adorno called Kafka.
David Markson
#70. Nothing expresses Kafka's innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of "writing as a form of prayer": he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.
Ernst Pawel
#71. To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
Walter Benjamin
#72. In Kafka's story "Wedding Preparations in the Country," Edward Raban fantasizes about splitting into two forms: one, to remain in bed all day, dreaming; the other, to go forth and conduct the business of the world.
Franz Kafka
#73. The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle: That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
- David Foster Wallace, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness" (2005)
David Foster Wallace
#74. He who has read Kafka's Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters.
George Steiner
#75. I heard a story the other night about an editor who visited the Iowa Workshop and, when asked what sorts of books she published, replied, "Classic books." One of the students asked her, "You mean like Kafka?" Apparently she said, "Oh, I don't think I would publish Kafka."
Matthew Specktor
#77. In Hollywood, you still have wonderful actors, but it's so hard to work there. To work becomes a Kafka nightmare - it's the last communist country!
Gerard Depardieu
#78. I would really hate it if I could call up Kafka or Hemingway or Salinger and any question I could throw at them they would have an answer. That's the magic when you read or hear something wonderful - there's no one that has all the answers.
Regina Spektor
#79. I met Kafka and he jumped over a building to get away from me.
Peter Orlovsky
#80. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
Zadie Smith
#81. I know. It's easy to forget things you don't need anymore."
Excerpt From: Haruki Murakami. "Kafka on the Shore." iBooks.
Haruki Murakami
#82. But if I were to say who influenced me most, then I'd say Franz Kafka. And his works were always anchored in the Central European region.
Vaclav Havel
#83. No matter how far you run. Distance might not solve anything."
Haruki Murakami. "Kafka on the Shore.".
Haruki Murakami
#84. If you have to deal with our friends at ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it's like a Kafka novel. Files just disappear.
Jeb Bush
#85. Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka's devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque.
Cynthia Ozick
#86. Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell.
(in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)
Joseph Brodsky
#87. I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.
Lynne Tillman
#88. Kafka saw both himself and Red Peter as hybrids, as monstrous thinking devices mounted inexplicably on suffering animal bodies.
J.M. Coetzee
#90. Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.
Alan Bennett
#91. Many of the writers I admire - Melville, Dickinson, Kafka - were virtually invisible during their lifetimes. Art, I think, often has to dance around in the void.
Jerome Charyn
#92. Kafka regarded the end of "The Metamorphosis"- its composition in interrupted by a business trip- as "unreadable." He also wrote in his diary that he found it"bad," but of course Kafka relished his failure. Failure is precisely what he expected and resolved to accomplish- and he hid behind it.
Franz Kafka
#94. When I am not reading Kafka I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka I miss thinking about him. Having missed thinking about him for a while, I take him out and read him again. That's how it works.
Laszlo Krasznahorkai
#95. Kafka, it seems, is at his best when he fails.
Franz Kafka
#96. I dreamt that Earth was finished. And the only
human being to contemplate the end was Franz
Kafka. In heaven, the Titans were fighting to the
death. From a wrought-iron seat in Central Park,
Kafka was watching the world burn.
Roberto Bolano
#97. If a man without a woman, as it says in a passage in the Talmud dear to the heart of Kafka, is not a man, then it is Amshel who became a man, even though on the point of death, but it is Franz who narrates this odyssey and teaches us how to become Amshel, how to become a man.
Claudio Magris
#98. That awful cockroach story! The mother chasing her own son away with a broom. Horrible. I was cleaning obsessively for days. Is that typical of this Monsieur Kafka?" "You've summed it up well, Madame. Some people have to study it for decades to get the meaning.
Nina George
#99. HOBBES:
If you don't get a goodnight kiss you get Kafka dreams.
Bill Watterson
#100. Most animals are like the unfortunate Gregor Samsa after metamorphosis. They are Kafka-creatures, organisms with rich thoughts and emotions but no system for translating what they think into something that they can express to others.
Marc Hauser
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