166 quotes found
"It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable … it's better to be quotable than honest."
"Most of the propositions I’m interested in have been kidnapped and dressed up by academic philosophy, but they are in fact the kind of proposition which would occur to any intelligent person in his bath. They're not "academic" questions — they're simply questions which have been given academic status … Philosophy can be reduced to a small number of questions which can be battered about most bars most nights."
"I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself."
"I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion. At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realised why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed — that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence."
"I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon."
"Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering; the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands."
"Since we cannot hope for order let us withdraw with style from the chaos."
"My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers."
"When someone disagrees with you on a moral point you assume that he is one step behind in his thinking, and he assumes that he has gone one step ahead. But I take both parts, O'Hara, leapfrogging myself along the great moral issues, refuting myself and rebutting the refutation towards a truth that must be the compound of two opposite half-truths. And you never reach it because there is always something more to say."
"I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it."
"The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe — responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages."
"Donner: Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."
"There is presumably a calendar date — a moment — when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it."
"It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright."
"It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting."
"How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight."
"Dotty: Archie says the Church is a monument to irrationality. George: … The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality! — and so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover's favour, or a home for stray dogs! You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!"
"Language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas, and one consequence of the failure to take account of this is that modern philosophy has made itself ridiculous by analysing such statements as, "This is a good bacon sandwich," or, "Bedser had a good wicket.""
"An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized."
"Bennett seems to be showing alarming signs of irony. I have always found that irony among the lower orders is the first sign of an awakening social consciousness. It remains to be seen whether it will grow into an armed seizure of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or spend itself in liberal journalism."
"Tzara: Causality is no longer fashionable owing to the war. Carr: How illogical, since the war itself had causes. I forget what they were, but it was all in the papers at the time. Something about brave little Belgium, wasn't it? Tzara: Was it? I thought it was Serbia... Carr: Brave little Serbia...? No, I don't think so. The newspapers would never have risked calling the British public to arms without a proper regard for succinct alliteration."
"To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus."
"War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero. It takes courage to sit down and be counted."
"I had no idea Gwendolen knew any foreign languages, and I am not sure that I approve. It's the sort of thing that can only broaden a girl's mind."
"When I was at school, on certain afternoons we all had to do what was called Labour — weeding, sweeping, sawing logs for the boiler-room, that sort of thing; but if you had a chit from Matron you were let off to spend the afternoon messing about in the Art Room. Labour or Art. And you've got a chit for life? Where did you get it? What is an artist? For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who's the artist."
"An artist is the magician put among men to gratify — capriciously — their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships — and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes — husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer."
"I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary. … I forget the third thing."
"Now a philosopher exploring the difficult terrain of right and wrong should not be over-impressed by the argument "a child would know the difference". But when, let us say, we are being persuaded that it is ethical to put someone in prison for reading or writing the wrong books, it is well to be reminded that you can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever."
"A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it."
"I never got used to the way the house Trots fell into the jargon back in Grimsby — I mean, on any other subject, like the death of the novel, or the sex life of the editor's secretary, they spoke ordinary English, but as soon as they started trying to get me to join the strike it was as if their brains had been taken out and replaced by one of those little golf-ball things you get in electric typewriters... "Betrayal"… "Confrontation"… "Management"… My God, you'd need a more supple language than that to describe an argument between two amoebas."
"Wagner: There were printers getting more than journalists! Milne: Yes, I know, but you make it sound as if the natural order has been overthrown. Fish sing in the streets, rivers run uphill, and the printers are getting more than the journalists. Okay — you're worth more than a printer. But look at some of this — "We find the vanishing vicar of Lovers' Leap!" "Sally Smith is a tea lady in a Blackpool engineering works, but it was the way she filled those C-cups which got our cameraman all stirred up!" It's crap. And it's written by grown men earning maybe ten thousand a year. If I was a printer, I'd look at some of the stuff I'm given to print, and I'd ask myself what is supposed to be so special about the people who write it — is that radical enough for you — Dick?"
"The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists."
"Milne: No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable. Ruth: I'm with you on the free press. It's the newspapers I can't stand."
"Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins."
"I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him."
"Mageeba: Do you know what I mean by a relatively free press, Mr. Wagner? Wagner: Not exactly, sir, no. Mageeba: I mean a free press which is edited by one of my relatives."
"The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism."
"I'm showing an interest in your work. I thought you liked me showing an interest in your work. My showing. Save the gerund and screw the whale."
"Public postures have the configuration of private derangement."
"Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course."
"This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly. What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might...travel."
"I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead."
"Chater: You insulted my wife in the gazebo yesterday evening! Septimus: You are mistaken. I made love to your wife in the gazebo. She asked me to meet her there, I have her note somewhere, I dare say I could find it for you, and if someone is putting it about that I did not turn up, by God, sir, it is a slander."
"We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?"
"Oh, you're going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars - big bangs, black holes - who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money?"
"I'd push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I think I'd lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through."
"It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them."
"It's the wanting to know that makes us matter."
"Septimus: When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore. Thomasina: Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?"
"I will take his secret to the grave, telling people along the way. Betrayal is no sin if it is whimsical."
"The Church's idea of the good and the beautiful excludes sexual aberration, apart from chastity, I suppose because it's the rarest"
"To dream of taking the sword in the breast, the bullet in the brain [...] and wake up to find the world goes wretchedly on and you will die of age and not of pain."
"Miss Frobisher smiles, with little cause that I know of. If Jesus of Nazareth had had before him the example of Miss Frobisher getting through the Latin degree papers of the London University Examinations Board he wouldn’t have had to fall back on camels and the eyes of needles, and Miss Frobisher’s name would be a delightful surprise to encounter in Matthew, Chapter 19; as would, even more surprisingly, the London University Examinations Board. Your name is not Miss Frobisher? What is your name? Miss Burton. I’m very sorry. I stand corrected. If Jesus of Nazareth had had before him the example of Miss Burton getting through the... Oh, dear, I hope it is not I who have made you cry."
"My life is marked by long silences."
"Alexander: I myself was educated in Italy. My doctorate in philosophy is from the University of Padua. Renne: Really? Philosophy? Alexander: My dissertation was on worms. Renne: Worms the philosopher? Alexander: No, just worms. Renne: Ah, the philosophy of worms. Alexander: Not at all. Worms have no philosophy, as far as is known."
"Alexander: No spunk, simple as that! Your brother's an army deserter! Michael: Oh yes, I've resigned my commission. Alexander: He's refusing to return to duty. Michael: On grounds of ill health, Papa. I'm sick of the Army. Alexander: No discipline, that's the problem! Michael: No, it's riddled with discipline, that's the problem. That and Poland."
"Michael: "March here, march there, present arms, where's your cap?" — you've no idea, the whole Army's obsessed with playing at soldiers."
"Alexander: How the world must have been changing while I was holding it still."
"Herzen: Marx is a bourgeois from the anus up. Natalie : Alexander! I won't have that word... Herzen: Sorry, middle-class."
"Bakunin: Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not — well, it's progress"
"Turgenev: The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation."
"Their coarseness is the sinew of some kind of brute confidence which is the reason England is home to every shade of political exile. They don't give asylum out of respect for asylum-seekers, but out of respect for themselves. They invented personal liberty, and they know it, and they did it without having any theories about it. They value liberty because it's liberty."
"Bakunin: Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish. Herzen: Is that the same people or different people? Bakunin: The same people."
"Wake me up for breakfast, if I'm not dead."
"(Falls down in a drunken stupor): Let's sit down."
"It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing."
"My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."
"Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it. [Elle est désirée pour la salir. Non pour elle-même, mais pour la joie goûtée dans la certitude de la profaner.]"
"If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older."
"If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life."
"Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them."
"A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar— you pretend it's not there."
"Most men give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain."
"Good things, when short, are twice as good."
"From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts."
"My wife and I are deeply saddened to learn of the death of one of our greatest writers, Sir Tom Stoppard. A dear friend who wore his genius lightly, he could, and did, turn his pen to any subject, challenging, moving and inspiring his audiences, borne from his own personal history. We send our most heartfelt sympathy to his beloved family. Let us all take comfort in his immortal line: "Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.""
"Stoppard just assumed his audience was as well read and inquisitive as he was. … Philosophy is the foundation of Stoppard’s plays. They cite Aquinas, Aristotle, Ayer, Bentham, Kant, Moore, Plato, Ramsey, Russell, Ryle and Zeno."
"When Harold Pinter was lobbying to have London's Comedy Theatre renamed the Pinter Theatre, Stoppard wrote back: "Have you thought, instead, of changing your name to Harold Comedy?""
"Tom Stoppard is in my pantheon. I just saw Leopoldstadt on Broadway, and was equally moved and impressed. (Moved to the point of sobbing, impressed to the point of continued hero worship.) His Arcadia is my favorite play, and had a seismic impact on my writing."
"Verlassen sind wir doch wie verirrte Kinder im Walde. Wenn Du vor mir stehst und mich ansiehst, was weißt Du von den Schmerzen, die in mir sind und was weiß ich von den Deinen. Und wenn ich mich vor Dir niederwerfen würde und weinen und erzählen, was wüßtest Du von mir mehr als von der Hölle, wenn Dir jemand erzählt, sie ist heiß und fürchterlich. Schon darum sollten wir Menschen vor einander so ehrfürchtig, so nachdenklich, so liebend stehn wie vor dem Eingang zur Hölle."
"Ich glaube, man sollte überhaupt nur solche Bücher lesen, die einen beißen und stechen. Wenn das Buch, das wir lesen, uns nicht mit einem Faustschlag auf den Schädel weckt, wozu lesen wir dann das Buch? Damit es uns glücklich macht, wie Du schreibst? Mein Gott, glücklich wären wir eben auch, wenn wir keine Bücher hätten, und solche Bücher, die uns glücklich machen, könnten wir zur Not selber schreiben. Wir brauchen aber die Bücher, die auf uns wirken wie ein Unglück, das uns sehr schmerzt, wie der Tod eines, den wir lieber hatten als uns, wie wenn wir in Wälder verstoßen würden, von allen Menschen weg, wie ein Selbstmord, ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. Das glaube ich."
"Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never."
"The bliss of murder! The relief, the soaring ecstasy from the shedding of another’s blood! Wese, old nightbird, friend, alehouse crony, you are oozing away into the dark earth below the street. Why aren’t you simply a bladder of blood so that I could stamp on you and make you vanish into nothingness? Not all we want comes true, not all the dreams that blossomed have borne fruit, your solid remains lie here, already indifferent to every kick. What’s the good of the dumb question you are asking?"
"Plenty of hope — for God — no end of hope — only not for us."
"Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt."
"What a fate: to be condemned to work for a firm where the slightest negligence at once gave rise to the gravest suspicion! Were all the employees nothing but a bunch of scoundrels, was there not among them one single loyal devoted man who, had he wasted only an hour or so of the firm's time in the morning, was so tormented by conscience as to be driven out of his mind and actually incapable of leaving his bed?"
"How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense."
""Hey, there’s something falling down in there," said the chief clerk. Gregor tried to suppose to himself that what had happened to him might some day also happen to the chief clerk. There was no denying that anything was possible."
"I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself."
"Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light."
"He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister's. He remained in this state of empty and peaceful reflection until the tower clock struck three in the morning. He still saw that outside the window everything was beginning to grow light. Then, without his consent, his head sank down to the floor, and from his nostrils streamed his last weak breath."
"Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. His landlady's cook, who always brought him his breakfast at eight o'clock, failed to appear on this occasion. That had never happened before."
"It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable."
"They're talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding, anyway. It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves."
"This question of yours, Sir, about my being a house painter — or rather, not a question, you simply made a statement — is typical of the whole character of this trial that is being foisted on me. You may object that it is not a trial at all; you are quite right, for it is only a trial if I recognize it as such. But for the moment I do recognize it, on grounds of compassion, as it were. One can't regard it except with compassion, if one is to regard it at all. I do not say that your procedure is contemptible, but I should like to present that epithet to you for your private consumption."
"The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other."
"What an obstacle had suddenly arisen to block K.'s career! And this was the moment when he was supposed to work for the bank? He looked down at his desk. This the time to interview clients and negotiate with them? While his case was unfolding itself, while up in the attics the Court officials were poring over the charge papers, was he to devote his attention to the affairs of the bank? It looked like a kind of torture sanctioned by the Court, arising from his case and concomitant with it."
"Even that has its reason; it is often better to be in chains than to be free."
"'...it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.' 'A melancholy conclusion,' said K. 'It turns lying into a universal principle.In the Cathedral"
"Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice."
""Like a dog!" he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him."
"I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more"
"One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom."
"There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us."
"If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything"
"The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. An attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached."
"The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last day."
"I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond."
""Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said."
"Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon."
"Eternal childhood. Life calls again. It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendour forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons."
"Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate — he has little success in this — but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others; after all, dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor. This assumes that he does not need both hands, or more hands than he has, in his struggle against despair."
"Hat matt nicht die Augen, um sich sie auszureißen und das Herz zum gleichen Zweck? Dabei ist es ja nicht so schlimm, das ist Übertreibung und Lüge, alles ist Übertreibung, nur die Sehnsucht ist wahr, die kann man nicht übertreiben. Aber selbst die Wahrheit der Sehnsucht ist nicht so sehr ihre Wahrheit, als vielmehr der Ausdruck der Lüge alles übrigen sonst. Es klingt verdreht, aber es ist so. Auch ist es vielleicht nicht eigentlich Liebe wenn ich sage, daß Du mir das Liebste bist; Liebe ist, daß Du mir das Messer bist, mit dem ich in mir wühle."
"The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler."
"The thornbush is old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further."
"There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people."
"Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one does not see any stars. Anyone who does miracles says: I cannot let go of the earth."
"Religions get lost as people do."
"Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues."
"Das Böse weiß vom Guten, aber das Gute vom Bösen nicht. Selbsterkenntnis hat nur das Böse. - Die Acht Oktavhefte; published by BookRix, 9-8-2014."
"Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore."
"What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people."
"A man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost."
"Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible," she said, "but that alone doesn't make it true."
"Oh well, memories,” said I. “Yes, even remembering in itself is sad, yet how much more its object! Don’t let yourself in for things like that, it’s not for you and it’s not for me. It only weakens one’s present position without strengthening the former one — nothing is more obvious — quite apart from the fact that the former one doesn’t need strengthening."
"When . . . some leisurely passer-by stopped . . . and spoke of cheating, that was in its way the stupidest lie ever invented by indifference and inborn malice, since it was not the hunger artist who was cheating, he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward."
"To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of non-understanding, was impossible."
""I always wanted you to admire my fasting," said the hunger artist. "We do admire it," said the overseer, affably. "But you shouldn't admire it," said the hunger artist. "Well then we don't admire it," said the overseer, "but why shouldn't we admire it?" "Because I have to fast, I can't help it," said the hunger artist. "What a fellow you are," said the overseer, "and why can't you help it?" "Because," said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking, with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer's ear, so that no syllable might be lost, "because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else." These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was still continuing to fast."
"How much my life has changed, and yet how unchanged it has remained at bottom! When I think back and recall the time when I was still a member of the canine community, sharing in all its preoccupations, a dog among dogs, I find on closer examination that from the very beginning I sensed some discrepancy, some little maladjustment, causing a slight feeling of discomfort which not even the most decorous public functions could eliminate; more, that sometimes, no, not sometimes, but very often, the mere look of some fellow dog of my own circle that I was fond of, the mere look of him, as if I had just caught it for the first time, would fill me with helpless embarrassment and fear, even with despair."
"All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!"
"Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations."
"So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being."
""You asking me the way?" "Yes," I said, "since I can't find it myself." "Give it up! Give it up!" said he, and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter."
"We met a large group of workmen who were marching with flags and banners to a meeting. Kafka said, "These people are so self-possessed, so self-confident and good humoured. They rule the streets, and therefore think they rule the world. In fact, they are mistaken. Behind them already are the secretaries, officials, professional politicians, all the modern satraps for whom they are preparing the way to power." "You do not believe in the power of the masses?" "It is before my eyes, this power of the masses, formless and apparently chaotic, which then seeks to be given a form and a discipline. At the end of every truly revolutionary development there appears a Napoleon Bonaparte." "You don"t believe in a wider expansion of the Russian Revolution?" Kafka was silent for a moment, then he said: "As a flood spreads wider and wider, the water becomes shallower and dirtier. The Revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tormented mankind are made out of red tape.""
"By believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired."
"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 obsessions mercilessly."
"One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party."
"It’s strange that my work has been classified as magic realism because I see my novels as just being realistic literature. They say that if Kafka had been born in Mexico he would have been a realistic writer. So much depends on where you were born."
"Kafka was a Jew in his heart and soul. He learned Hebrew and Yiddish. He attended a beit midrash in Frankfurt and he wanted to settle in Palestine. He had lots of women, but most of them were Jewish. I don't mean that he proclaimed his Jewishness every morning, but that he was connected with Jewishness in every sense of the word. For example, the pounding at the castle — the desire to enter and understand this mystery — is a very Jewish longing. For good reason, authors such as his colleague Max Brod tried to find kabbalistic meaning in his works. Consider, for example, his two greatest works, The Trial and The Castle. He felt that he was a defendant who had done no wrong. A man is sitting at home or in a pension, looking forward to breakfast, and suddenly someone comes in and says, “You're under arrest! You are accused!” for no reason and no purpose. That's the classic Jewish situation, manifested most acutely during the Holocaust. It was a situation of total guilt with no sin. People were accused, taken from their homes, shut up in ghettos, led to railroad stations and from there to extermination camps — not because they had done anything wrong but because Jewish blood flowed in their veins. Kafka illustrated the absurdity of Jewish life in Europe even before the Holocaust. In this sense Kafka grasped the lowly position Jews held in European civilization...Kafka performed a psychic analysis of the defendant. Although he refrained from mentioning the Jew explicitly in order to give this absurd situation a much broader meaning, this, in essence, is Jewish psychology. A Jewish fate, if you will. Interestingly, this analysis led him indirectly to Zionism, and he even wanted to settle in Palestine."
"But beneath its reasonably serene surface, the website can be as ugly and bitter as 4chan and as mind-numbingly bureaucratic as a Kafka story."
"He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball, and of the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball, or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth."
"Metamorphosis is an unnerving account of a humble commercial traveller who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. At first nurtured and protected by his sister and mother, he eventually becomes loathsome in the eyes of his family and so voluntarily expires before he can be killed. Treat a man as sub-human, Kafka implies, and we make it easier for ourselves to eliminate him with an unstained conscience. The strength of the story is that Kafka starts with a fantastic premise and then develops it with impassioned logic and a rigorous attention to prosaic detail."
"Kafka described with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the future absolutism of the state Apparat."
"The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to re-read. His endings or his absence of endings, suggest explanations which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem justified, require that the story be reread."
"The way in which he experienced estrangement was literature, with an intensity greater than that of any other writer of this century, more inexorably than Joyce or Proust or Mann. From this experience flows the power of Kafka’s works to comprehend all forms of alienation, and to suggest a response to political estrangement different from political counterterror: the effort to illuminate this condition by grasping through literature that play is the reward for the courage of accepting death."
"He writes about his father, but he is actually writing a diatribe against the fascist state, against a Germanized Prague. It is minor literature because he is Jewish and a Czech writing in German; he is writing the reverse side of history. And that is what literature gives you: the reverse side of history."
"[Reverence for Kafka has been] the ideological origin of all the theories and tendencies of the "third way to socialism" in Czechoslovakia, especially the non-recognition of the power of the working class and its leading role... [This has been] the mental preparation for those events which have plunged our neighbour-nation into the deep crisis exploited by counter-revolutionaries."
"When I first read Kafka, I constantly had the feeling that I was writing it myself. It was as if I'd had a similar basic experience of the world."
"It is mainly Jewish readers who think of Kafka as a Jewish writer. This isn’t a matter of possessiveness, the way one claims a sports hero for an ethnic group — after all, if one wanted to claim a writer to carry the Jews into world literature, would it be asking too much to pick someone, well, happier? — but rather a matter of Kafka’s work itself. Jewish readers cannot help but hear the echoes of the Dreyfus Affair in “In the Penal Colony,” or those of the blood libel in “The Trial”; such readers see in Kafka’s famous cockroach a horrifying caricature of the way others have so often seen them — and worse, the way they sometimes see themselves. Nor is this awareness mere suspicion. Though none of his published works mention it explicitly, Kafka’s private letters and diaries reveal an interest in Jewish identity verging on obsession. But Kafka’s broader fame comes from the point where this obsession merges with more ordinary fears, making non-Jewish readers see his work as expressing an abstract “existential” dread, rather than the very real dread that defined European Jewish existence."
"Franz Kafka has become emblematic of the horrors of our century; the word "Kafkaesque" has entered the language in a way that "Proustian" and "Joycean" have not. In popularity and adaptability, The Trial beats all its rivals among the classic exposés of totalitarianism — Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Ernst Jünger's On the Marble Cliffs, Levi's The Periodic Table and Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."
"I’m interested in how power works … Franz Kafka just knows, man. He knows how power works. In terms of lessons for young writers, they should read all of Kafka’s journals. They’re so depressing yet so relatable at the same time. It seems like he had no faith in his work, and then you look at the work he produced … I don’t know. Maybe talking down to yourself is a way of keeping the faith."
"One night [at college] a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed, I was so surprised. The first line reads, "As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect...." When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories."
"The only way Kafka could envisage of creating his in every respect impossible writing possible was to demarcate the area of impossibility by making a language without a particular color, without a local tone, without qualities, as it were."
"it seems that Kafka is even more famous in Prague than President Havel. An entire Kafka industry has blossomed here. He is sold in every store: Kafka shirts, Kafka toys; beer mugs and pots with Kafka's picture. There are Kafka restaurants, cafeterias, theatres. He looks down at us from everywhere. Kafka, the sickly, alienated individualist, the Jew who never completely felt himself to be a citizen of the Jewish, the Czech, or the German worlds, has risen from the dead in the vulgarized form of a sort of Czech rock star."
"The impersonality of the communist state is not easy to understand. The huge dangers with which its subjects are daily confronted seem to come from nowhere, while threatening everyone who accepts responsibility for his own existence and so dares to be a man. Franz Kafka described the workings of this machine in a prophetic book, the moral of which many of our statesmen, including Mr Powell, have yet to learn. When they have learnt it, they will also know why The Castle, along with every other work by Prague's greatest writer, is now banned in the country of his birth."
"Kafka's Jewishness was a kind of dream, whose authentic moment was located always in the nostalgic past. His survey of the insectile situation of young Jews in Inner Bohemia can hardly be improved upon: "With their posterior legs they were still glued to their father's Jewishness, and with their waving anterior legs they found no new ground." Alienation from oneself, the conflicted assimilation of migrants, losing one place without gaining another This feels like Kafka in the genuine clothes of an existential prophet, Kafka in his twenty-first-century aspect (if we are to assume, as with Shakespeare, that every new century will bring a Kafka close to our own concerns). For there is a sense in which Kafka's Jewish question ("What have I in common with Jews?") has become everybody's question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We're all insects, all Ungeziefer, now."
"The work of Kafka … has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God."
"Kafka is enormously important. Years ago I wrote a Jewish travel guide to Prague and other cities in the region. At the time, I was really into Kafka. It comes out a little in my work now, probably more subconsciously than it did then. Then I was reading all of his Letters to Felice, I was nuts, literally, when I was living in Prague. It’s a cliché, I know. But to this day, everything we say about Kafka’s a cliché, since his writings are seen, with 20/20 hindsight, as a horrifying prediction of what was to come, both with the Holocaust and Soviet tyranny, living in a police state. But in terms of influence, there’s the horror and the grotesquery, the allegory and hyperbole, the elevation of pulpy narrative, the Jewish obsessions, the generational tensions, but also the humor. I mean, Kafka’s stories were also meant to be funny, which is something that is not often appreciated today. Philip Roth called him a “sit-down comic”...Culturally, working in this period of enormous transformation for Jews and in Europe more broadly, I found Kafka a sort of guide to turning history and memory into a narrative, into art that becomes even more compelling than the tradition it replaces. And there are specific things, like authenticity. Kafka was obsessed with Galician Jewish refugees in Prague at the beginning of World War I. He considered them to be the embodiment of authenticity. And in his diaries, he writes about them. He talks about how if he could be anybody in the world, he’d just want to be this little Jewish boy he remembered seeing, seemingly free of worry. He idealized them as true Jews, essentially. And that definitely stuck with me, because I’ve done similar things. I’m not proud of that, but we’re always trying to deprogram ourselves from what we have learned as authenticity when we were young."
"Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of our speech recognition system goes up."
"It is generally believed that scientific talent reveals itself in early youth. [...] This was certainly not my case. I somehow slid into my scientific profession. My mother wished for me to become a physician, just like my father. [...] I myself wanted to be a lawyer, defender of the unjustly accused. But my career is the result of political circumstances, academic possibilities, and lucky accidents."
"It's easier to say something stupid than write something stupid."
"He was not a pioneer of speech recognition, he was the pioneer of speech recognition."
"There can be no doubt that Tsai's phenomena (whether they be works of art in the strict sense, or whether they be fantastic artifices) are extremely important. They show what promises and dangers may be in here in a "play," if it is proposed by a great artist. Because, even if Tsai's phenomena be considered artifices, there can be no doubt that Tsai is a great artist. Not because what he does is pleasant, or because he proposes a play, or because he represents the spirit of our times, but because he reveals to us, through artifice or works of art, the concrete experience of a future full of promise or abysmal danger."
"The photographer’s gesture as the search for a viewpoint onto a scene takes place within the possibilities offered by the apparatus. The photographer moves within specific categories of space and time regarding the scene: proximity and distance, bird- and worm’s-eye views, frontal- and side-views, short or long exposures, etc. The Gestalt of space–time surrounding the scene is prefigured for the photographer by the categories of his camera. These categories are an a priori for him. He must ‘decide’ within them: he must press the trigger."
"After years of trial and error Franz Kafka] has at last found the only diet that suits him, the vegetarian one. For years he suffered from his stomach; now he is as healthy and as fit as I have ever known him. Then along come his parents, of course, and in the name of love try to force him back into eating meat and being ill—it is just the same with his sleeping habits. At last he has found what suits him best, he can sleep, can do his duty in that senseless office, and get on with his literary work. But then his parents... This really makes me bitter."
"Once he Kafka] went to the Berlin aquarium … Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks, "Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you any more." It was the time that he turned strict vegetarian. If you have never heard Kafka saying things of this sort with his own lips, it is difficult to imagine how simply and easily, without any affectation, without the least sentimentality—which was something almost completely foreign to him—he brought them out. Among my notes I find something else that Kafka said about vegetarianism. He compared vegetarians with the early Christians, persecuted everywhere, everywhere laughed at, and frequenting dirty haunts. "What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.""