“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”

“Writer speaks a stench.”

“Writing is prayer.”

“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, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.”

“In a way, I was safe writing”

“Perhaps there is another kind of writing, I only know this one, in the night, when anxiety does not let me sleep, I only know this one. And what is devilish in it seems to me quite clear. It is the vanity and the craving for enjoyment, which is forever whirring around oneself or even around someone else...and enjoying it. The wish that a naive person sometimes has: "I would like to die and watch others crying over me," is what such a writer constantly experiences: he dies (or he does not live) and continually cries over himself”

“That is a very poor career, but only a poor career give the world the light that an imperfect, but pretty good writer wants to generate--at all costs, unfotunately.”