Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Kraus

Kraus flips the usual bargain between writer and reader: you don’t come to prose for clarity, you come for a more interesting kind of trouble. “Make a riddle out of an answer” is barbed because it treats “answers” as suspect to begin with - prepackaged, complacent, the sort of certainty that journalism, politics, and polite culture love to sell. The writer’s job, in Kraus’s view, isn’t to deliver resolution but to re-complicate what power insists is settled.

The line carries his trademark Viennese cynicism and linguistic vigilance. Kraus built a career skewering the press, advertising, and public hypocrisy, especially in the years bracketing World War I when slogans and official “explanations” became moral anesthetic. In that world, an “answer” can be propaganda, a tidy story that absolves someone. Turning it into a riddle is a form of resistance: you force the reader to notice the seams, the euphemisms, the motives hiding inside supposedly neutral statements.

There’s also a quieter self-indictment here. Riddles can enlighten, but they can also be a flex - obscurity as prestige, complexity as a moat. Kraus admired precision, yet he knew how easily verbal brilliance becomes its own kind of vanity. The quote works because it captures that double edge: writing at its best destabilizes false certainty; writing at its worst just converts insight into performance.

So the “writer” isn’t a dispenser of truth. He’s an irritant, a saboteur of easy comprehension, reminding you that the neatest answers are often the most dangerous ones.