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“Celebrity is a mask that eats into your face.”

- John Updike (1932-2009

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Franz Kafka

Considered to be one of the most important and influential writers in Western literature, Franz Kafka was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Prague, which at that time was a part of Austria-Hungary. The absurdity and hopelessness that permeate his work are considered emblematic of existentialism. The term “Kafkaesque” is widely used to describe situations, ideas and themes which are reminiscent of Kafka’s works, as particularly found in the novel, The Trial, and the novella, The Metamorphosis. 

The unforgettable first sentence of The Metamorphosis begins, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect...” This fantastic story of a troubled individual in a nightmarish world paves the way for artists such as the film director Federico Fellini, and the novelists Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Salman Rushdie whose works also employ magical and fantastic compositional elements.

While he is remembered primarily as a fiction writer, it notable that he had a successful career as an employee of ‘The Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute’ for the Kingdom of Bohemia. Kafka was apparently a good employee as evidenced by the promotions he received. He also seemed to be proud of his commercial writing as the compiler of information and author of his company’s annual report, as he frequently sent copies of the reports to his friends and family.

As told by Peter Drucker, in Managing in the Next Society, it is arguable that his greatest contribution to humanity was not made through his fiction writing, but rather through his invention of the first ‘Hard Hat’ to curb injuries and deaths in the steel industry, the use of which spread to many industrial and construction workplaces, thereby significantly reducing deaths and traumatic brain injuries from the time of its introduction at the beginning of the 20th century to its global use in workplaces throughout the world today. 

“A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.”

“Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.”

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”

                

“A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.”

“Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.”

“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”

“Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.”

“By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.”

“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”

“How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.”

“I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.”

“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”

-  Franz Kafka  (1883-1924)

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Russian author and historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has written a number of major novels based on his own experience of Soviet prisons, the most famous being The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1978). Descended from an intellectual Cossack family, he was serving in the East Prussian military when he was arrested for criticizing Joseph Stalin in private correspondence with a friend and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labor camp. He was imprisoned from 1945 to 1953, followed by permanent internal exile. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system, and, for these efforts, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.  He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 but returned in 1994 and now lives with his wife, Natalia in Moscow. He has continued to criticize western materialism and Russian bureaucracy and secularization.  Solzhenitsyn is the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature.  

“Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life – don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.”

“Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.”

“When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.”

“You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power- he’s free again.”

“Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you- you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.”

“Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.”

“For a country to have a great writer . . . is like having another government. That’s why no régime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”

“It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God’s heaven.”

“Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist - it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.”

“Good literature substitutes for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through.”

“A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.”

“Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.”

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.”

“Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.”

“Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.”

“Our envy of others devours us most of all.”

“If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  (1918- )

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Flannery O’Connor

An American writer particularly acclaimed for her stories that combined sardonic humor with tragic brutality, Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a Catholic family. Along with authors like Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, O'Connor belonged to the Southern Gothic tradition that focused on the decaying south. And in the vein of William Faulkner, she often wrote in a ‘Southern Gothic’ style that that relied on grotesque and morally flawed characters, most commonly fundamentalist Protestants, who then undergo transformations of character in the pursuit of the holy. She remarked, however that “anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” However grotesque the setting, she tried to portray her characters as they might be touched by divine grace. O’Connor wrote: “Grace changes us and change is painful.” Her body of work was small, consisting of only thirty-one stories, two novels, and some speeches and letters. 

In 1951 she was diagnosed with lupus and moved to her ancestral farm. Fascinated by birds of all kinds, she raised peacocks, ducks, hens, geese, and many other kinds of exotic birds until her death in 1964. O’Connor often incorporated images of peacocks into her stories.

“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

“It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.”

“When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business.”

“The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins.  He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions . . .”

                

“It’s considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion. Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody’s mouth and which no book jacket can do without. It is a quality, which no one can put his finger on in any exact critical sense, so it is safe for anybody to use. Usually I think what is meant by it is that the writer excuses all human weakness because human weakness is human. The kind of hazy compassion demanded of the writer now makes it difficult for him to be anti-anything.”

“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”

“The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don’t have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we’ve got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech.”

“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.”

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”

“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.  You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.”

“A story isn’t any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hangs on and expands in the mind.”

“In my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace . . . With the serious writer, violence is never an end in itself.”

- Flannery O’Connor  (1925-1964)

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Jean-Paul Sartre

The French existentialist philosopher, John-Paul Sartre was a leading figure in 20th century philosophy and has been called “the most written about twentieth-century author.” He was a dramatist, screenwriter, novelist and critic and the existentialism he formulated and popularized is profoundly original. Its popularity reached a peak in the forties, and his theoretical writings as well as his novels and plays constitute one of the main inspirational sources of modern literature.

Sartre was captured by the Nazis while serving as a French army meteorologist.  While a prisoner of war for a one-year duration, he wrote his famous work, Being And Nothingness. After being released, he participated actively in the French resistance to German occupation until the liberation Europe. Because of his experience, Sartre recognized a connection between the principles of existentialism and the more practical concerns of social and political struggle.

Sartre’s personal and professional life was greatly enriched by his long-term collaboration with Simone de Beauvoir, the noted writer and feminist. The two, it is documented, became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship although they were not monogamous.

Despite declining the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964, due to his belief that accepting honors aligned a writer to the institution granting the award, Sartre has been recognized as one of the most respected leaders of post-World War II French culture and literature.

 
“A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.”

“Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.”

“We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.”

“When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.”

“We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.”

               

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

“Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.”

“One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.”

“For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.”

“Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.”

“In love, one and one are one.”

“A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.”

“Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others.”

“It’s the well-behaved children ... that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on they make society pay dearly.”

“Hell is other people.”

“God is absence. God is the solitude of man.”

“That God does not exist, I cannot deny. That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.”

– Jean-Paul Sartre  (1905-1980)

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More Writer Quotations Here

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