AtomicQuote

Ernst Pawel Quote

Nothing expresses Kafka’s innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of writing as a form of prayer: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.

Ernst Pawel

Nothing expresses Kafka’s innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of writing as a form of prayer: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.

Tags: kafka, life, writers, writing

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About Ernst Pawel

Ernst Pawel (January 23, 1920 – August 16, 1994) was a German American biographer, novelist, and translator who worked primarily for New York Life Insurance from 1946 to 1982. Pawel wrote about the Holocaust and Sigmund Freud in three novels from 1951 to 1960. From 1954 to 1965 Pawel translated books by Georges Simenon and Lotte Lehman.
During the 1980s, Pavel released biographies of Franz Kafka and Theodor Herzl. Following his death in 1994, Pawel's biography of Heinrich Heine and his own memoir were released. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and was nominated for the American Book Award for Nonfiction in 1984.