From Kafka's Diaries

Letter sent to a publisher:

Dear Mr. Rowohlt,

     I am enclosing the little prose pieces you wanted to see; they will probably be enough to make up a small book. While I was putting them together towards this end, I sometimes had to choose between satisfying my sense of responsibility and an eagerness to have a book among your beautiful books. Certainly I did not in each instance make an entirely clear-cut decision. But now I should naturally be happy if the things pleased you sufficiently to print them. After all, even with the greatest skill and the greatest understanding the bad in them is not discernible at first sight. Isn't what is most universally individual in writers the fact that each conceals his bad qualities in an entirely different way?

                                                               Faithfully--

23 September. After completing "The Judgement":

This story, 'The Judgement', I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd - 23rs, from ten o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water.