{"quotes":[{"text":"My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming.","author":"Jonathan Franzen","tags":["fiction","kafka","novel","writing"],"id":418,"author_id":"Jonathan+Franzen"},{"text":"You told me that Kafka was not a thinker, and that a 'genetic' approach to his work would disclose that much of it was only a kind of very imaginative whining. That was during the period when you were going in for wrecking operations, feeling, I suppose, that the integrity of your own mental processes was best maintained by a series of strong, unforgiving attacks. You made quite an impression on everyone, in those days: you ruffled blouse, you long magenta skirt slit to the knee, the dagger thrust into your boot. 'Is that a metaphor?' I asked, pointing to the dagger; you shook your head, smiled, said no.","author":"Donald Barthelme","tags":["kafka","metaphor"],"id":8979,"author_id":"Donald+Barthelme"},{"text":"Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.","author":"Milan Kundera","tags":["biographers","identity","kafka"],"id":33441,"author_id":"Milan+Kundera"},{"text":"I'm alone inside the world of the story, my favorite feeling in the world.","author":"Haruki Murakami","tags":["kafka","kafka-on-the-shore","reading"],"id":62503,"author_id":"Haruki+Murakami"},{"text":"I am a typical example of Western Jew. This means I don't have a moment of peace, that nothing has come easily to me, not just the present and the future, but even the past, that thing that each man receives as his birth-right: even that I have to conquer, and perhaps that is the hardest task.","author":"Franz Kafka","tags":["jewish","kafka","letter","past"],"id":108883,"author_id":"Franz+Kafka"},{"text":"When the little mouse, which was loved as none other was in the mouse-world, got into a trap one night and with a shrill scream forfeited its life for the sight of the bacon, all the mice in the district, in their holes were overcome by trembling and shaking; with eyes blinking uncontrollably they gazed at each other one by one, while their tails scraped the ground busily and senselessly. Then they came out, hesitantly, pushing one another, all drawn towards the scene of death. There it lay, the dear little mouse, its neck caught in the deadly iron, the little pink legs drawn up, and now stiff the feeble body that would so well have deserved a scrap of bacon.The parents stood beside it and eyed their child's remains.","author":"Franz Kafka","tags":["death","dying","kafka","mice","mouse"],"id":109998,"author_id":"Franz+Kafka"},{"text":"If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.","author":"George Steiner","tags":["criticism","kafka","laws","love"],"id":129332,"author_id":"George+Steiner"},{"text":"He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.","author":"Franz Kafka","tags":["death","dying","fear","franz","kafka","life"],"id":157606,"author_id":"Franz+Kafka"},{"text":"No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.","author":"Eugenio Montale","tags":["communication","kafka","silence"],"id":210560,"author_id":"Eugenio+Montale"},{"text":"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 a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.","author":"Jonathan Safran Foer","tags":["animals","kafka","veganism","vegetarianism"],"id":229707,"author_id":"Jonathan+Safran+Foer"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":24,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}