I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

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 the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.

Writing is prayer.

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.