Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.
To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.
I am reading Sienkiewicz. What tormenting reading. What a powerful genius! And there never was such a first-rate writer of the second-rate class.
Wherever I see some mystique, be it virtue or family, faith or fatherland, there I must commit some indecent act.
Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.
I am a collection of the family’s body parts.
Man does not fear death, only the suffering.
There were three of us; Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and myself – the three muskateers of the Polish avant-garde between the wars. Only Witkiewicz remains to be discovered.
It is in the prime of youth that man sinks into empty phrases and grimaces. It’s in this smithy that our maturity is forged.
Our element is unending immaturity.
You, oh mature ones, keep company solely with other mature ones, and your maturity is so mature that it can only chum up with maturity!
Not surprisingly, because too much attention to one object leads to distraction, this one object conceals everything else, and when we focus on one point on the map we know that all other points are eluding us.
Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.
Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.
A brilliant liar; he has total recall.
Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.
I could have protested of course, who says I couldn’t – I could have risen to my feet at any moment, walked up to them, and – no matter how difficult it would have been – made it abundantly clear that I was not seventeen but thirty. I could have – yet I couldn’t because I didn’t want to, the only thing I wanted was to prove that I was not an old-fashioned boy!
There is nothing that the mature hate more, there is nothing that disgusts them more, than immaturity.
A hanged sparrow! Who would ever think of hanging a sparrow? It’s like flavoring borscht with two mushrooms instead of just one – it’s too much!
Kneadalski shrank, crouched, and hit him from below with a shattering, copycat counterface as follows: he too rolled his eyeballs, lifted them and ogled, he too opened his mouth in calflike rapture, and, his face thus prepared, he moved it in circles till a fly fell into his gaping mouth; he then ate it.
Two conspirators with a frog, following the line of a whiffletree.