Ever since my childhood, the falsity of my easy, bourgeois life had been a nightmare for me. This feeling of unreality never left me. Always 'between' and never 'in', I was like a shade, a chimera. And I would not be lying if I said that it was reality for which I searched in the simplicity and the brute health of the lowest social classes, during those expeditions into the slums of Warsaw. But I also looked for that reality inside myself, in those vague internal areas, deserted, peripheral, inhuman, where anomalies flourish together with Formlessness, Disease, Abjection. For one can find reality in all that is most ordinary, most primitive, and most healthy, as well as in what is most twisted and demented. Man's reality is the reality both of health and of disease.

Yet these invesitgations did not go so far as to make me touch the depths of things. So I wasn't entitled to write a 'real' book. I was capable of no more than parody. Here style was the parody of style. Art mimicked and mocked art. The logic of nonsense was a parody of sense and of logic. And my so-called success was a parody of success.

Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament