BiographyType: Novelist Born: 3 July 1883 Died: 3 June 1924 Born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, capital of what is now the Czech Republic, writer Franz Kafka grew up in an upper middle-class Jewish family. After studying law at the University of Prague, he worked in insurance and wrote in the evenings. In 1923, he moved to Berlin to focus on writing, but died of tuberculosis shortly after. German was his first language. In fact, despite his Czech background and Jewish roots, Kafka's identity favored German culture. His friend Max Brod published most of his work posthumously, such as "Amerika" and "The Castle". |
Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.
We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.
Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.
He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.
All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.
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