Kafka Quotes - page 2

"Wakefield" prefigures Franz Kafka, but the latter modifies, and sharpens, the reading of "Wakefield." The debt is mutual; a great writer creates his or her precursors. He or she creates them and in some fashion justifies them. (Jorge Luis Borges)
What we are most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden learns from Kafka, is impatience-and he decides that the hero "is, in fact, one who is not anxious.” But it was inevitable that Auden should arrive at this point. His anxiety is fundamental; and the one thing that anxiety cannot do is to accept itself, to do nothing about itself-consequently it admires more than anything else in the world doing nothing, sitting still, waiting. View quote
Randall Jarrell
After years of trial and error Franz [Kafka] has at last found the only diet that suits him, the vegetarian one. For years he suffered from his stomach; now he is as healthy and as fit as I have ever known him. Then along come his parents, of course, and in the name of love try to force him back into eating meat and being ill-it is just the same with his sleeping habits. At last he has found what suits him best, he can sleep, can do his duty in that senseless office, and get on with his literary work. But then his parents... This really makes me bitter. View quote
Max Brod
Once he [Kafka] went to the Berlin aquarium ... Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks, "Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you any more." It was the time that he turned strict vegetarian. If you have never heard Kafka saying things of this sort with his own lips, it is difficult to imagine how simply and easily, without any affectation, without the least sentimentality-which was something almost completely foreign to him-he brought them out. Among my notes I find something else that Kafka said about vegetarianism. He compared vegetarians with the early Christians, persecuted everywhere, everywhere laughed at, and frequenting dirty haunts. "What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people." View quote
Max Brod
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. View quote
Jessica Pare
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. View quote
Louis Begley
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! View quote
Gérard Depardieu
I think what Kafka does is give a purely mechanical explanation of that complex machine in the story, as sort of a substitute for explaining the situation we're in. What I mean is ... " I have to give it some more thought. "What I mean is, that's his own device for explaining the kind of lives we lead. Not by talking about our situation, but by talking about the details of the machine. View quote
Haruki Murakami
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. View quote
Zadie Smith
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. View quote
Zadie Smith
I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka. (Margaret Atwood)
If you have to deal with our friends at ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it's like a Kafka novel. Files just disappear. View quote
Jeb Bush
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. View quote
Václav Havel
The Diary of Vaslav Nijinjsky reaches a limit of sincerity beyond any of the documents that we have referred to on this study. There are other modern works that express the same sense that civilized life is a form of living death; notably the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the novels of Franz Kafka; but there is an element of prophetic denunciation in both, the attitude of healthy men rebuking their sick neighbors. We possess no other record of the Outsider's problems that was written by a man about to be defeated and permanently smashed by those problems. View quote
Colin Wilson
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. View quote
Walter Benjamin
His work is full of the signs of those two cardinal sins from which (as Kafka pointed out) all the others spring: impatience and laziness. The work of every artist is conditioned by the way in which he resists or yields to these temptations. View quote
Patrick Swift
A friend of mine that I was in a band with started me on Kafka, which in turn led to Camus and Sartre. View quote
Craig Ferguson
Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? View quote
Milan Kundera
Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories - and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself. View quote
Milan Kundera
What we are most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden learns from Kafka, is impatience - and he decides that the hero "is, in fact, one who is not anxious.”. View quote
Randall Jarrell
Borges creates, outside time and space, imaginary and symbolic worlds. It is a sign of his importance that, in placing him, only strange and perfect works can be called to mind. He is akin to Kafka, Poe, sometimes to Henry James and Wells, always to Valery by the abrupt projection of his paradoxes in what has been called "his private metaphysics.”. (André Maurois)