Best Kafka Quotes

46 Kafka quotes by 40 unique authors

In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that… — Jorge Luis Borges
HOBBES: If you don't get a goodnight kiss you get Kafka dreams. — Bill Watterson
On the wall next to the table, next to the scones that provided each table with its own circle of lamplight were quotations about reading,… — Haven Kimmel
Oshima's silent for a time as he gazes at the forest, eyes narrowed. Birds are flitting from one branch to the next. His hands are… — Haruki Murakami
Your self-esteem is a notch below Kafka. — Woody Allen
If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal) — Franz Kafka
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… — Franz Kafka
[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… — Milan Kundera
Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were… — Haruki Murakami
Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The… — Roland Barthes
Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy) — Joseph Brodsky
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… — Patricia Highsmith
This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in… — Jonathan Safran Foer
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… — Milan Kundera
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… — David Foster Wallace
I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I've known in… — Cormac McCarthy
The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and… — David Nicholls
One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and… — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. — John Updike
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… — Zadie Smith
It is not Kafka's fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability… — Herman Hesse

Who Wrote These Kafka Quotes

40 authors contributed a total of 46 Kafka Quotes, led by these top contributors: