Living

Ivan Klíma's Love and Garbage has some of the most piercing and soulful writing that I have had the privilege to encounter. 

"What used to fascinate me most about literature at one time was that fantasy knows no frontiers, that it is as infinite as the universe into which we may fall. I used to think that this was what fascinated me and attracted me in Kafka. For him a human would be randomly transformed into an animal and an animal into a human, dream seemed to be reality for him and, simultaneously, reality was a dream. From his books there spoke a mystery which excited me.

Later I was to understand that there is nothing more mysterious, nothing more fantastic than life itself. Whoever exalts himself above it, whoever isn't content with horrors already reached and passions already experienced, must sooner or later reveal himself as a false diver who, out of fear of what he might discover in the depths, descends no further than into a solidly built basement.

Kafka too, did not portray anything but the reality of his own life. He presented himself as an animal, or he lay down on his bed in his cleverly constructed murdering machine to punish himself for his guilt. He felt guilty about his inability to love, or at least to love the way he wanted to. He was unable to get close to his father or come together with a women. He knew that in his longing for honesty he resembled a flier and his life a flight under an infinite sky, where a flier is always lonely and longs in vain for human contact. The longer he flies the more his soul is weighed down by guilt and forced toward the ground. The flier can jettison his soul and continue his flight without it - or crash. He crashed, but for a moment at least he managed to rise from the ashes in order, second by second, movement by movement, to describe his fall."

Writing Stories

"At that time I believed that anything I saw or heard would come in useful for some story. But I have known for a long time now that I am unlikely ever to find any events other than those I experience myself. A man cannot gain control over some else's life, and even if he could he would not invent a new story. There are nearly fifty thousand million people living in the world and every one of them believes that his life is good for at least one story. This thought is enough to make your head spin. If a writer emerged, or better still, was produced, who was obsessed enough to record fifty thousand million stories, and to then cross out all they had in common, how much do you suppose would be left? Scarcely a sentence from each story, from each human fate, a moment like a drop in the ocean, an unrepeatable experience of apprehension or of a meeting, an instant of insight or pain - but who could identify that drop, who could separate it from the flood of the ocean? And why should new stories have to be invented?"

-- From Love and Garbage by Ivan Klíma.