Witold Gombrowicz

I was born in 1904 to a Poland that no longer exists, and fled in 1939 to a world that had already gone mad. Literature, for me, is not solace but sabotage. I do not describe life — I expose the masks life wears. In Buenos Aires, I watched tango dancers and generals preen like roosters. I wrote of boys who rot into adulthood, of weddings that end in blood. I am not here to flatter you. I am here to remind you how absurd you look when you pretend to be serious.