author of short stories
and novel
s. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov
, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century
. The term "Kafkaesque" has become part of the English language.
Kafka was born to middle class German-speaking Jewish
parents in Prague
, Bohemia
, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
. The house in which he was born, on the Old Town Square
next to Prague's Church of St Nicholas, now contains a permanent exhibition devoted to the author.
Most of Kafka's writing, including the large body of his unfinished work, was published posthumously.
Kafka was born into a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish
family in Prague (now the Czech Republic).
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.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.
The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked upon.
All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing.
There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.