Great! I've written something stupid, but I haven't signed a contract with anyone to produce solely wise and perfect works. I gave vent to my stupidity...and here I am, reborn.

Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.

I didn't go to the lectures. My valet, who was more distinguished than I, went instead.

I wished, first of all, to buy my way into people's good graces with my book so that, in subsequent personal contact, I would find the ground already prepared, and, I reasoned, if I succeeded in implanting in their soules a favorable image of me, this image would in turn shape me; and so, willy-nilly, I would become mature.

We say 'forest' but this word is made of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unencompassed. The earth. Clods of dirt. Pebbles. On a clear day you rest among ordinary, everyday things that have been familiar to you since childhood, grass, bushes, a dog (or a cat), a chair, but that changes when you realize that every object is an enormous army, an inexhaustible swarm.

Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.

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.

Wherever I see some mystique, be it virtue or family, faith or fatherland, there I must commit some indecent act.

Man is made in such a way that he continually has to define himself and continually escape his own definitions.

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!

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.

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.

You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don't... you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother's son.

Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.

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!

I became bold because I had absolutely nothing to lose: neither honors, nor earnings, nor friends. I had to find myself anew and rely only on myself, because I could rely on no one else. My form is my solitude.

Two conspirators with a frog, following the line of a whiffletree.

To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence, allowing one to feel it through the ineptitude of the interpretation. I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.

A brilliant liar; he has total recall.

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!