Don’t change the beggar into a conqueror, because it was the beggar who led you to conquest.

There is nothing that the mature hate more, there is nothing that disgusts them more, than immaturity.

Many a beauty in her own room behaves repulsively till one splits one’s sides.

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!

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.

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!

The world was indeed a kind of screen and did not manifest itself other than by passing me on and on – I was just the bouncing ball that objects played with!

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.

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.

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