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.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.

Sad company is bad company.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

Is not parody the eternal lot of man?

Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.