“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
More from Kafka on Writing
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”
“Books are a narcotic.”
“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.", July 5, 1922]”
“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
“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?”
“Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.”
“Writing is prayer.”
“What is written is merely the dregs of experience.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and...”
Flaubert
9 quotes“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of gen...”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.”
Nora Roberts
6 quotes“You can fix anything but a blank page.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“Literature is language charged with meaning”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”