Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

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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.

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Having a trial like that means losing a trial like that (Sufrir un proceso es casi haberlo perdido)

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You wouldn't believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it.

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I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.

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You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.

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

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

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

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I carry the bars within me.

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