Witold Gombrowicz Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

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

Witold Gombrowicz
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.

Witold Gombrowicz
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.

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

Witold Gombrowicz
An idea abstracted from man does not fully exist.... There is no word that is not also flesh.

Witold Gombrowicz
Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act.

Witold Gombrowicz
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.

Witold Gombrowicz
Spirit is born of the imitation of spirit and a writer must pretend to be a writer in order finally to become a writer.

Witold Gombrowicz
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 among ordinary, everyday things that have been familiar to you since childhood, grass, bushes, a dog (or a cat), a chair, but that changes when you realize that every object is an enormous army, an inexhaustible swarm.

Witold Gombrowicz