Kafka was the most important and fundamental experience of my youth, a bitter-sweet upheaval which brought into play all the potentialities of my self, a trauma of adolescence which, at the time when I made Kafka's acquaintance, I tried to master by making careful entries in my diary.

[…] My 'Treasury of Ideas' was, I now see, an amorphous collection of hastily recorded scraps of reading and conversation, the origin of which I only really knew at the moment when I wrote them down.

[…] I made a selection of entries in my diary, and from my 'Treasury of Ideas' for Florian to publish in Czech. But this never happened …

[…] Then there began for me a period of restless wandering between different people, towns, ideas and ocupations. In the course of it, the intellectual and emotional experience of my youth was drowned by a flood of new adventures. The image of Kafka faded away. I turned away from what had been fundamental to my youth[….] the grey book of my 'Treasury of Ideas' lay abandoned under a pile of old notebooks, sketches, drawings and newspaper cuttings[….] My mind was purified only by the pressure of war and violence. I suddenly stood face to face with the insect world of The Metamorphosis and the cold and merciless machinery of In the Penal Settlement …

From Janouch's Conversations With Kafka

[Who trusts Janouch's introduction to the second edition of his conversations with Kafka? Trustworthy or not, it's moving. In fact, I like the lies, which are so obviously lies …]