Witold Gombrowicz
Witold Gombrowicz
Witold Marian Gombrowiczwas a Polish writer. His works are characterised by deep psychological analysis, a certain sense of paradox and absurd, anti-nationalist flavor. In 1937 he published his first novel, Ferdydurke, which presented many of his usual themes: the problems of immaturity and youth, the creation of identity in interactions with others, and an ironic, critical examination of class roles in Polish society and culture. He gained fame only during the last years of his life, but is now considered...
NationalityPolish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth4 August 1904
CountryPoland
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.
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.
Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.
If he [the Artist] were to take up the pen it would be...to better express his individuality and explain it to others; or else to put his internal affairs in order...to deepen and sharpen his relationship with his fellow men because other souls exert an immense and creative influence on our soul; or to try to fight for a world as he would like it to be, for a world that is indispensable to his life.
A brilliant liar; he has total recall.
Man does not fear death, only the suffering.
I am a collection of the family's body parts.
Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.