From the obituary of Yehuda Amichai (b. 5/3/24, d. 9/22/00) that was published in the New York Times:

Metaphor “is the great human revolution, at least on a par with the invention of the wheel.”

“There’s an old Jewish saying, ‘If you meet the devil, take him with you into the synagogue.’  Try to take the evil of politics into yourself, to influence it imaginatively, to give it human shape.  This is my attitude toward politics.”

For him, all poetry was political.  “This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality, and politics is part of reality, history in the making.  Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.”

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Marina Tsvetaeva in 1926 in “The Poet on the Critic”:

“Who am I writing for?  Not for the millions, not for one person alive, and not for myself.  I write for the sake of the thing itself.  The thing writes itself through me.”

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Thomas Mann to Erich Kahler, 3/18/31:

“Give the times their due and publish what you have written.  I understand your inhibitions, but we believe until almost at the end that the decisive word remains to be written, and yet we have always set down far more of the decisive words than we ourselves can possibly appreciate.”

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Franz Kafka (as quoted, who knows how reliably, by Gustav Janouch in his Conversations with Kafka):
Wealth is “material insecurity.”

Kafka’s works are, in his own words, “evidence of solitude.”  Hence his sincere desire to destroy them.

On Georg Trakl: ” ‘He had too much imagination,’ said Kafka.  ‘So he could not endure the war [WW I], which arose above all from a monstrous lack of imagination.’ ”

“My complaints about the disorder in the office, and especially around myself, are only a trick, by which I try to hide the insecurity of my existence from the accusing and inquisitive gaze of the outside world.  In reality, I only manage to live because of the disorder, from which I steal the last remnant of personal freedom.”

The Germans “do not wish to comprehend, understand, read.  They only wish to possess and rule; for that, understanding is usually a hindrance.”

” ‘Are they dancers?’ I stupidly inquired, with a glance at a well-disciplined chair of chorus girls.  ‘No, they’re soldiers,’ replied Kafka.  ‘A [musical] revue is a military parade in disguise.’ “