It Is Impossible To Distrust One's Writing

There Are Times When The Kindness Of Strangers Only Makes Things Worse Because One Realizes How Badly One Is In Need Of Kindness And That The Only Source Is A Stranger.

A Couple Months After My Heart Attack, Fifty-seven Years After I'd Given It Up, I Started To Write Again. I Did It For Myself Alone, Not For Anyone Else, And That Was The Difference. It Didn't Matter If I Found The Words, And More Than That, I Knew It Would Be Impossible To Find The Right Ones.

Sometimes I Get The Feeling That We're Just A Bunch Of Habits. The Gestures We Repeat Over And Over, They're Just Our Need To Be Recognized. Without Them, We'd Be Unidentifiable. We Have To Reinvent Ourselves Every Minute.

He Learned To Live With The Truth. Not To Accept It, But To Live With It. It Was Like Living With An Elephant. His Room Was Tiny, And Every Morning He Had To Squeeze Around The Truth Just To Get To The Bathroom. To Reach The Armoire To Get A Pair Of Underpants He Had To Crawl Under The Truth, Praying It Wouldn't Choose That Moment To Sit On His Face. At Night, When He Closed His Eyes, He Felt It Looming Above Him.

Obviously I've Been Reading Kafka For A Long Long Time, Since I Was Really Young, And Even Before I Ever Read Him I Knew Who He Was. I Had This Weird Sense That He Was Some Kind Of Family. Like Uncle Kafka. Now I Really Think Of Him That Way, The Way We Think About An Uncle Who Opened Up Some Path For Being In A Family That Otherwise Wouldn't Have Existed. I Think Of Him That Way As A Writer And A Familial Figure.