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“... has been imposed on us is the nobility, and who are we to rob ourselves of the only law we have? Franz Kafka’s ‘The Problem of Our Laws’ – ‘Zur Frage der Gesetze’ – was translated by Michael ...”

“... with André Breton on a splendid volume of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms. She is deeply familiar with Kafka’s writings, having translated most of them into French: her knowledge of books on Kafka and the world he lived in is less impressive. The scheme she follows here is neither chronological nor thematic, but is formed by ...”

“... In​ September 1917, having just discovered he had tuberculosis, Franz Kafka took a break from his work at an insurance company in Prague and spent eight months with his sister Ottla in the village of Zürau, now called Siřem. He also seemed to be taking a break from writing, or at least from the writing he was supposed to be doing ...”

“... obvious and yet an irresolvable affront to one’s sense of order and logic. The writings of Franz Kafka, I would suggest, are the literary equivalent of the Möbius strip. Consider this tiny sampling of passages from his letters and diaries quoted in Mr Hayman’s biography: [Of a present sent to a correspondent] Keep it in your pocket, it will ...”

“... When Kafka died in 1924, not one of his novels had been published. He was known to a small circle – though Janouch’s testimony shows that that circle spread beyond his friends – as the author of a story about a man who turned into a beetle. Brod published The Trial in 1925, and followed it with The Castle (1926), America (1927) and a volume of short fragments and aphorisms, The Great Wall of China (1931 ...”

“... I have come​ to the conclusion that anyone who thinks about Kafka for long enough inevitably develops a few singular, unassimilable and slightly silly convictions. (The graph may be parabolic, with the highest incidence of convictions – and the legal resonance is invited – found among those who have spent the most time thinking and those who have spent next to no time thinking ...”

“... His name was Franz Kafka, and he quite often went to the movies. Some such statement constitutes both the basis of Kafka Goes to the Movies and its primary impediment: the rock it has to roll up the hill. According to Max Brod, his lifelong friend and first editor and biographer, Kafka loved the movies; at times, Brod reported, he would talk about little else ...”

“...  An ongoing trial in Tel Aviv is set to determine who will have stewardship of several boxes of Kafka’s original writings, including primary drafts of his published works, currently stored in Zurich and Tel Aviv. As is well known, Kafka left his published and unpublished work to Max Brod, along with the explicit instruction that the work should be destroyed on Kafka’s death ...”

“... novelist. Much of his writing practice, he has said, takes off from a ‘what if?’ What if Franz Kafka had made it to America and there lived on to become a New Jersey schoolmaster? What if Anne Frank had survived and found out about the publication of her diary from a chance reading of Time magazine? What if a man could actually become a ...”

“... instead of famously not doing so, Jane Austen had written only about the Napoleonic Wars, or Kafka about World War One.In Joseph’s poems, anything could go anywhere. It’s a principle that provides a sort of unity. Jump-cuts in every direction, continuity by leaching. Mingled, mangled, maximal diction, anything from the technical jargon of finance to ...”

“... forgotten by everyone except the Armenians, it was taken up by the poet, playwright and novelist Franz Werfel. He transformed it into The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the enormous, grand-manner novel which many considered his finest work. Werfel, who died in Californian exile in 1945, is now in the ‘almost forgotten’ league himself, in spite of being one of ...”

“... you can have knowledge of it, from here. Yes, you gave me that much credit, you said I was a true Kafka in ‘strength ... eloquence, endurance, a certain way of doing things on a grand scale’ and I’ve not been content just to rot. In that way, I’m still the man I was, the go-getter. Restless. Restless. Taking whatever opportunity I can. There isn’t ...”

“... was published in LRB, Vol. 5, No 19) is supposed to be written in self-defence by Hermann Kafka to his son, Franz. It is easy to feel that the relatives of a genius sometimes get a raw deal. There were friends of D.H. Lawrence’s family who objected strongly to the portrait of his father in Sons and Lovers: they ...”

“... There are many perils in writing about Kafka. His work has been garrisoned by armies of critics with some fifteen thousand books about him at the last count. As there is a Fortress Freud so is there a Fortress Kafka, Kafka his own castle. For admission a certain high seriousness must be deemed essential and I am not sure I have it ...”

“... ways fairly amateurish. He is capable of falling into the dimmest dry facetiousness: ‘The late Franz Kafka was never, if his biographers are to be trusted, employed at the Royal Crimean Hospital – a fact which the many admirers of his work cannot but deplore, since the experience would doubtless have supplied him with unique and valuable material ...”