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"I believe that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book does not rouse us with a blow then why read it?"
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"Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. "I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind."
"Pages entertain me more than pictures do."
"A book lives a new life every time it is read."
"I read to know the past, I write to express my love for the future."
"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."
"This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job."
"Considering that the modern and contemporary literature taught in most universities is largely bleak, cynical, morbid, pessimistic, misanthropic dogmatism, often written by suicidal types who sooner or later kill themselves with alcohol or drugs, or shotguns, Professor Takuda was a remarkably cheerful man."
"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart."
"To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention."
Explore more quotes by Franz Kafka
"Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe."
"It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable."
"But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?"
"Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so."
"One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party."
"In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it."
"What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness."
"All right then, I'll be mad at you on this score, which incidentally is no great misfortune, as things balance out quite well if there's a little anger for you lurking in one corner of my heart."
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