Spurious

British publisher Frederic Warburg (who published English editions of Kafka's novels during the heavy bombing of London in World War II) mentions in his book "All Authors are Equal" (he was also George Orwell's publisher) an anecdote involving Brod, Kafka and their manuscripts. He attributes this story ("for whose authenticity I do not vouch") to Hannah Arendt, but does not provide a source. In it, Brod is strolling down a Prague street, a few days after Kafka's death, and meets a literary editor ("Let's call him Rudi," writes Warburg):

Rudi: "You look sad, Max, indeed we are all sad at the shocking news of poor Kafka's death."

Max: "... my friend Franz placed on my shoulders a heavy burden. Franz has given me instructions that I am to burn all his unpublished work, all of it."

Rudi: "Well, you must burn it, then, as Franz wishes."

Max: "It is not so easy, my friend. I have read his work, his novels and stories, all of it. These are masterpieces. How can I burn them?"

Rudi: "Masterpieces, you say. Then you must not burn them, Max. You must have them published."

Max: "Against dear Franz's wishes, Rudi?"

Rudi (thinks hard, then in an emphatic voice): "I have it, Max. Publish Franz's work and burn all your own."

Via a piece in Haaretz. (Via Literary Saloon)

It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them. Death, for example, is nothing frightening, otherwise it would have frightened Socrates. But the judgement that death is frightening - now, that is something to be afraid of. So when we are frustrated, angry or unhappy, never hold anyone except ourselves - that is, our judgements - accountable. An ignorant person is inclined to blame others for his own misfortune. To blame oneself is proof of progress. But the wise man never has to blame another or himself.

Keep the prospect of death, exile and all such apparent tragedies before you every day - especially death - and you will never have an abject thought, or desire anything to excess.

[...] Try to influence your friends to speak appropriately by your example. If you find yourself in unfamiliar company, however, keep quiet. Keep laughter to a minimum; do not laugh too often or too loud[...] Avoid fraternising with non-philosophers. If you must, though, be bareful not to sink to their level; beacuse, you know, if a companion is dirty, his friends cannot help but get a little dirty too, no matter how clean they started out.

Never identify yourself as a philosopher or speak much to non-philosophers about your principles; act in line with those principles. At a dinner party, for instance, don't tell people the right way to eat, just eat the right way. Remember how Socrates so effaced himself that people used to approach him seeking an introduction to philosophers, and he would graciously escort them; that's how careless he was of the slight.

[...] Sheep don't bring their owners grass to prove them how much they've eaten, they digest it inwardly and outwardly bring forth milk and wool. So don't make a show of your philosophical learning to the unitiated, show them by your actions what you have absorbed. [...]

When faced with anything painful or pleasurable, anything bringing glory or disrepute, realize that the crisis is now, that the Olympics have started, and waiting is no longer an option; that the chance for progress, to keep or lose, turns on the events of a single day.

Lead me, Zeus, lead me Destiny, / To the goal I was long ago assigned . And I will follow without hesitation. Even should I resist, / In a spirit of perversity, I will have to follow nonetheless. / Whoever yields to necessity graciously, we account wise in God's ways.

Epictetus, Enchiridon

[...] Marina Tsvetayeva  had always held her work between herself and the reality of daily life; and when she found this luxury beyond her means, when she felt that for her son's sake she must, for a time, give up her passionate absorption in poetry and look round her soberly, she saw chaos, no longer screened by art, fixed, unfamiliar, motionless, and, not knowing where to run for terror, she hid in death, putting her head into the noose as she might have hidden her head under her pillow.

Pasternak, An Essay in Autobiography

No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more proletarians, no more democrats, no more armies, no more police, no more nations, no more of these idiocies, no more, no more, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING.

Thus we hope that the novelty which will be the same thing as what we no longer want will come into being less rotten, less immediately GROTESQUE.

Louis Aragon, Manifesto at the second Dada manifestation, 5 Feb 1920

The whole age can be divided into those who write and those who do not write. Those who write represent despair, and those who read disapprove of it and believe that they have a  superior wisdom - and yet, if they were able to write, they would write the same thing. Basically they are all equally despairing, but when one does not have the opportunity to become important with his despair, then it is hardly worth the trouble to despair and show it. Is this what it is to have conquered despair?

Kierkegaard, Journals

The mark and attitude of the ordinary man: never look for help or harm from yourself, only from outsiders. The mark and attitude of the philosopher: look for help and harm exclusively from yourself.

And the signs of a person making progress: he never criticizes, praises, blames or points the finger, or represents himself as knowing or amounting to anything. If he experiences frustration or disappointment, he points the finger at himself.

If he's praised, he's more amused than elated. And if he's criticized, he won't bother to respond. He walks around as if he were an invalid, careful not to move a healing limb before it's at full strength. He has expunged all desire, and made the things that are contrary to nature and in his control the sole target of his aversion. Impulse he only uses with detachment. He does not care if he comes across as stupid or naive. In a word, he keeps an eye on himself as if he were his own enemy lying in ambush.

from Epictetus, Enchiridion

Sept 16, 1956: I have no compulsion to write or to do anything except when I am possessed by routines, which can happen anytime. A lot of the time I just sit blank and narcotized letting sensations flow through me. I have a feeling that I might turn into somebody else, that I am losing my outlines.

Oct 13, 1956: I have entered a period of change more drastic than adolescence or early childhood. I am getting so far out one day I won’t come back at all. I can’t take time to go into all my mystic experiences which I have whenever  I walk out the door. There is something special about Tanger.

Oct 29, 1956: What I am writing now supersedes, in fact makes obsolete, anything I have written hitherto[....] I am really writing Interzone now, not writing about it.

Dec 20, 1965. I will send along 100 pages of Interzone, it is coming so fast I can’t hardly get it down, and shakes me like a great black wind through the bones ...

Jan 23, 1957. Interzone is coming like dictation. I can’t keep up with it.

Jan 28, 1957. Now my power’s really coming ...

Feb 14, 1957. Since sending MS. have written about fifty pages more, wilder than what you have. This is almost automatic writing. I often sit high on hash for as long as six hours typing at top speed.

August 28, 1957. I have always felt that the MS. To date was in a sense notes for a novel rather than the novel itself. This novel is now taking shape faster than I can write down.

Sep 20, 1957. As regards MS., I think any attempt at chronological arrangement extremely ill-advised[...] The MS. in present form does not hold together as a novel for the simple reason that it is not a novel. It is a number of connected – by theme – but separate short pieces. My feeling is that it will eventually grow into several novels all interlocking and taking place simultaneously as in a majoun dream. But I do not see organization as a problem.

Oct 28^th, 1957. If anyone finds this form confusing, it is because they are accustomed to the historical novel form, which is a three-dimensional chronology of events happening to someone already, for purposes of the novel, dead. That is the usual novel has happened. This novel is happening.

The only way I can write narrative is to get right outside my body and experience it. This can be exhausting and at times dangerous. One cannot be sure of redemption.

Nov 10^, 1957. I do nothing but work.... Given up liquor entirely. Writing the narrative now, which comes in great hunks faster than I can get it down. Changes in my psyche profound and basic. I feel myself not the same person.

Oct 10 1958. Brion Gysin living next door[....] He has undergone similar conversion to mine and doing GREAT painting[....] I see in his painting the psychic landscape of my own work. He is doing in painting what I try to do in writing. He regards his painting as a hole in the texture of so-called ‘reality’, through which he is exploring an actual place existing in outer space. That is, he moves into the painting and through it, his life and sanity at stake when he paints.

Late July 1959. Fact is I have become a megalomaniac, but with one essential difference and advantage. I have been outside. I have come up from the area of total humiliation and failure, climbed up cell by cell with a million set-backs and debacles.

William Burroughs, Letters vol. 1

In Scetis a brother went to Moses to ask for advice. He said to him, 'Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything'.

A hermit was asked, 'How is it that some struggle in their religious life, but do not receive grace like our predecessors?' He replied, 'Because then love was the rule, and each one drew his neighbour upward. Now love is growing cold, and each of us draws his neighbour downward, and so we do not deserve grace'.

Hilarion once came from Palestine to Antony on the mountain: and Antony said to him, 'Welcome, morning star, for you rise at break of day'. Hilarion said, 'Peace be unto you, pillar of light, for you sustain the world'.

The hermits said, 'If an angel really appears to you, do not accept it as a matter of course, but humble yourself, and say, 'I live in my sins and am not worthy to see an angel'.

Hyperchius said, 'The tree of life is high, and humility climbs it'.

[Poemen] said, 'A brother asked Alonius, "What is humility?" The hermit said, 'To be lower than brute beasts and to know that they are not condemned'.

[Poemen] said, 'Humility is the ground on which the Lord ordered the sacrifice to be offered'.

Mathois said, 'The nearer a man comes to God, the more he sees himself to be a sinner. Isaiah the prophet saw the Lord and knew himself to be wretched and unclean'.

Theophilus of holy memory, the bishop of Alexandria, once went to the mount of Nitria, and a hermit of Nitria came to see him. The bishop asked, 'What have you discovered in your life, abba?' The hermit answered, 'To blame myself unceasingly'. The bishop said, 'That is the only way to follow'.

... Zacharias took his cowl from his head, and put it beneath his feet and stamped on it, and said, 'Unless a man stamps upon self like that, he cannot be a monk'.

Evagrius said, 'To go against self is the beginning of salvation'.

They used to say of Arsenius that no one could understand the depths of his monastic life. [...]

[Antony] said, 'I saw the devil's snares set all over the earth, and I groaned and said, "What can pass through them?" I heard a voice saying, "Humility".'

[Allois] said, 'Until you can say in your heart, "Only I and God are in the world", you will not be at peace'.

[Allois] said, 'If you really want to, by the evening of one day you can reach a measure of godliness'.

A hermit said, 'Anyone who wants to live in the desert ought to be a teacher and not a learner. If he still needs teaching, he will come to harm'.

Hyperichius said, 'He who teaches others by his life and not his speech is truly wise'.

A brother sinned and the presbyter ordered him to go out of church. But Bessarion got up and went out with him, saying, 'I, too, am a sinner'.

A hermit said, 'When you flee from the company of other people, or when you despise the world and worldlings, take care to do so as if it were you who was being idiotic'.

A hermit said, 'The monk's cell is the furnace in Babylon in which the three children found the Son of God. It is the pillar of cloud out of which God spoke to Moses'.

Poemen said, 'The character of the genuine monk only appears when he is tempted'.

They said of Helladius that he lived twenty years in his cell, and did not once raise his eyes to look at the roof.

A hermit saw someone laughing, and said to him 'We have to render an account of our whole life before heaven and death, and you can laugh?'

A hermit said, 'As the shadow goes everywhere with the body, so we ought to carry penitence and weeping with us everywhere we go'.

A brother asked a hermit, 'I hear the hermits weeping, and my soul longs for tears, but they do not come, and I am worried about it'. He replied, 'The children of Israel entered the promised land after forty years in the wilderness. Tears are the promised land. When you reach them you will no longer be afraid of the conflict. For it is the will of God that we should be afflicted, so we may always be longing to enter that country'.

In Egypt once when Poemen was going somewhere he saw a woman sitting by a gravfe and weeping bitterly. He said, 'If all the delights of this world should come to her, they would not bring her out of sorrow. Just so should the monk always be weeping in his heart'.

A hermit, who had an experienced disciple, once turned him out in a fit of irritation. The disciple sat down outside to wait and the hermit found him there where he opened the door. So he did penance to him, saying, 'You are my abba now, because your humility and patience have overcome my weakness. Come inside, now you are the old abba, and I am the young disciple; my age must give way to your conduct'.

From The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks

I had now reached that phase of the disorder where all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering. [...]

In depression [the] faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. [...]

Then, after dinner, sitting in the living room, I felt a curious inner convulsion that I can describe only as despair beyond despair. It came out of the cold night; I did not think such anguish possible.

from William Styron, Darkness Visible

There were also dreadful, pouncing, seizures of anxiety. One bright day on a walk through the woods with my dog I heard a flock of Canada geese honking high above the trees ablaze with foilage; ordinarily a sight and sound that would have exhilarated me, the flight of birds caused me to stop, riveted with fear, and I stood stranded there, helpless, shivering, aware for the first time that I had been stricken by no mere pangs of withdrawal but by a serious illness whose name and actuality I was able finally to acknowledge. Going home, I couldn't rid my mind of the line of Baudelaire's, dredged up from the distant past, that for several days had been skittering around at the edge of my consciousness: 'I have felt the wind of the wing of madness'.

from William Styron, Darkness Visible