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

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!

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

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.

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.

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!

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