Comparison is the most abused intellectual tool of all. We compare men and women, man and God, good and bad, equal and unequal, forgetting that this sin only results in a punishment so severe that...

About some books we feel that our reluctance to return to them is the true measure of our admiration. It is hard to suppose that many people go back, from a spontaneous desire, to reread...

No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.

He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.

Personazhet e Kafkës na trubullojnë edhe sot e kësaj dite, ngaqë ata janë siç kemi qenë ne dikur, heronj të dorëzuar. Brenga jonë si lexues rritet edhe më, teksa mëvetësohemi e ndjejmë se, edhe si...

But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?

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.

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...

To je zabluda. Knjiga ne može da zameni svet. To je nemogućno. U životu sve ima svoj smisao i svoj zadatak koji ne mogu bez ostatka biti ispunjeni nečim drugim. Nije mogućno, na primer, proživeti...

At the same time all the houses round about promptly took part in this silence, and so did the darkness above them, reaching as far as the stars. And the footsteps of invisible passers-by, whose...

Tom prilikom Kafka mi reče: “Vi opisujete pesnika kao nekog čudesno velikog čoveka čije noge su na zemlji dok mu glava nestaje u oblacima. To je, prirodno, sasvim uobičajena slika u okviru malograđanskih konvencionalnih predstava....

sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless manthe most guilty.

writing as a form of prayer”: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.

Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.

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...

Der Sinn für die Darstellung meines traumhaften innern Lebens hat alles andere ins Nebensächliche gerückt, und es ist in einer schrecklichen Weise verkümmert und hört nicht auf, zu verkümmern. Nichts anderes kann mich jemals zufriedenstellen.

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...

É bom quando nossa consciência sofre grandes ferimentos, pois isso a torna mais sensível a cada estímulo. Penso que devemos ler apenas livros que nos ferem, que nos afligem. Se o livro que estamos lendo...

If anything in Kafka’s theology can be called Jewish, it is his virtual lack of any concept of ‘Nature’. There is in a sense no ‘Nature’ in Genesis either, since the world is created for...

Ja sam kraj ili početak.

The three of them knew it. She was Kafka’s mistress. Kafka had dreamt her. The three of them knew it. He was Kafka’s friend. Kafka had dreamt him. The three of them knew it. The...

Very often the test of one’s allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument...

The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we...