Quotes About Kafka

Stacey was sharp and educated, and I recommended a book to her. She claims it was Kafka, and that sounds like the kind of fun guy I was.

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.

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.

It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get—the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they 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 that horrific struggle. That

If there ever was a man of whom it could be said that he 'hungered and thirsted after righteousness,' it was Kafka.

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.

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.

A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.

Kafka remarks, with surprise, with enchantment, that he has entered into literature as soon as he can substitute "He" for "I." This is true, but the transformation is much more profound. The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing.

In quel periodo cominciò a leggere Kafka. La prima volta provò una sensazione di freddo, di gelo insidioso; qualche ora dopo aver terminato Il Processo si sentiva ancora intorpidito, molle.

Hermann Hesse a raison de dire que les textes de Kafka ne sont ni religieux, ni métaphysiques, ni moraux , mais simplement poétiques. (p. 250)