Words matter. These are the best Kafka Quotes from famous people such as Helen Oyeyemi, Jeb Bush, Etgar Keret, Jesse Ball, Cynthia Ozick, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
If you have to deal with our friends at ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it’s like a Kafka novel. Files just disappear.
I was first introduced to Kafka’s writing during my compulsory army-service basic training. During that period, Kafka’s fiction felt hyperrealistic.
As far as I can see, the best writers in the last two hundred years have been Whitman, Rilke, Proust, Kafka. Their best works: ‘Leaves of Grass – 1855;’ ‘Duino Elegies;’ ‘The Captive & The Fugitive;’ ‘The Castle.’
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.
I don’t want to turn 50 and say, ‘Gosh, I wish I’d lived in that part of the world for a time. I wish I’d read that book by Faulkner.’ I want time to delve back into Thoreau and Kafka.
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.
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!
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.
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
My main ambition as a teenager was to somehow resurrect the dark-minded writer Franz Kafka and become his girlfriend.
I did my dissertation on Kafka.
Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.
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.
Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.
If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That’s because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.
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.
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.
Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
