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

Witold Gombrowicz

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Witold Gombrowicz
Age: 64 †
Born: 1904
Born: August 4
Died: 1969
Died: July 24
Author
Diarist
Essayist
Jurist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Gombrowicz
Witold Gombrowicz
Life
Complicate
Exist
Serious
Literature
Easy
Doe
Make

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I am a collection of the family's body parts.
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I didn't go to the lectures. My valet, who was more distinguished than I, went instead.
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Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.
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A universal style is one that knows how to embrace lovingly those not quite developed.
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Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.
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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.
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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.
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Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.
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Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.
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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.
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Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.
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To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.
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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.
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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.
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Foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom.
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A brilliant liar he has total recall.
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Wherever I see some mystique, be it virtue or family, faith or fatherland, there I must commit some indecent act.
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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!
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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.
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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 pleasures, little extras. You've no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it's incredible how one grows.
Witold Gombrowicz