" This story, 'The Judgement', I wrote at one sitting, during the night of 22-23. 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. Several times during the night I heaved my own weight on my back. How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again....Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening of body and soul. "

― Franz Kafka , Diaries, 1910-1923