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A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.", July 5, 1922]

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A non-writing writer is a monster courting insa

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

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Writing is prayer.

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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, ...more

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You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself t...more

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What is written is merely the dregs of experience.

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Writer speaks a stench.

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

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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 proceed...more

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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 obs...more

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This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand ...more

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In a way, I was safe writing

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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, no...more

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German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncer...more