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..

Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal..

To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence….

A universal style is one that knows how to embrace lovingly those not quite developed..

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

To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today..

Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre..

Foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom..

Man does not fear death, only the suffering..

I am a collection of the family's body parts..

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 stupidi….

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 a….

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..

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

Don't be fooled by your own wisdom.

Our element is unending immaturity..

When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has”: “I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible ple….

The difference between western and eastern intellectuals is that the former have not been kicked in the ass enough..

Not surprisingly, because too much attention to one object leads to distraction, this one object conceals everything else, and when we focus on one p….

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

There were three of us; Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and myself--the three muskateers of the Polish avant-garde between the wars. Only Witkiewicz remain….