Jerzy Kosinski Quotes & Sayings

I do not gather things, I prefer to rent them rather than to possess them. — Jerzy Kosinski

Like nature, our economic system remains, in the long run, stable and rational ... We welcome the inevitable seasons of our economy! How foolish of us. — Jerzy Kosinski

I remember how, as a boy, I used to collect the cork tips of my father's cigarettes and stick them in my stamp albums. I believed they contained his unspoken words, which one day would explain everything. I have not changed. Now I explore my memories, trying to discover the substructure hidden beneath my past actions, searching for the link to connect them all. — Jerzy Kosinski

All my life I've been hiding. — Jerzy Kosinski

The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author. — Jerzy Kosinski

She protected herself by making herself believe no-one else could ever really understand her. — Jerzy Kosinski

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life. — Jerzy Kosinski

At first I was afraid that I would be left defenseless, that I would babble aloud the things I've always been terrified of saying. Instead, opium made me realize that I could say anything I liked without losing my identity. — Jerzy Kosinski

The popular culture says ... Do what you do, your life is predestined, like the installment plan on your house. There's not much you can do about it. Make your payments, live it, get sick, die, don't make any trouble. It is the Master Charge of destiny. Try to get your high credit rating. — Jerzy Kosinski

Persons who have been homeless carry within them a certain philosophy of life which makes them apprehensive about ownership. — Jerzy Kosinski

It's not that you aren't likable. On the contrary. You are. It's just that one wonders if you haven't made a career out of being so likable. — Jerzy Kosinski

All cats are the same in the dark, says the proverb. But it certainly did not apply to people, with them it was just the opposite. During the day they were all alike, running in their well-defined ways. At night they changed beyond recognition. — Jerzy Kosinski

You don't die in the United States, you underachieve. — Jerzy Kosinski

Can the imagination, any more than the boy, be held prisoner ?"
- from the foreword to the 1976 edition of "The Painted Bird — Jerzy Kosinski

People say, "Well, you went on television, it enlarged your readership." It did not at all, not at all. I might as well tell you, I lost some readership, because the profound audience felt somehow bothered by my too easy manner. — Jerzy Kosinski

There are many types of participation. One can observe so intensely that one becomes part of the action, but without being an active participant. — Jerzy Kosinski

I'm sure there are aspects of my personality buried within me that will surface as soon as I know I am completely loved. — Jerzy Kosinski

That's why she keeps her nails long, she says, to be able to scratch and claw. — Jerzy Kosinski

Travel gives me the opportunity to walk through the sectors of cities where one can clearly see the passage of time. — Jerzy Kosinski

Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life — Jerzy Kosinski

I look back into past history, the stored experiences or products of the imagination. I look no further forward than the evening. — Jerzy Kosinski

I am curious about grownups, not children. — Jerzy Kosinski

At times, feeling the wind on my brow, I went numb with horror. In my imagination I saw armies of ants and cockroaches calling to one another and scurrying toward my head, to some place under the top of my skull, where they would build new nests. There they would proliferate and eat out my thoughts, one after another, until I would become as empty as the shell of a pumpkin from which all the fruit has been scraped out. — Jerzy Kosinski

Homelessness is a part of our American system. There should be nothing wrong with this condition as long as the individual is not sentenced to unnecessary suffering and punishment. — Jerzy Kosinski

Here was one place where I could find out who I was and what I was going to become. And that was the public library. — Jerzy Kosinski

Physical comfort has nothing to do with any other comfort. — Jerzy Kosinski

Going around under an umbrella interferes with one's looking up at the sky. — Jerzy Kosinski

It is possible to stand around with a cocktail in one's hand and talk with everyone, which means with no one. — Jerzy Kosinski

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. — Jerzy Kosinski

I always have a sense of trembling, but so does a compass, after all. — Jerzy Kosinski

The planned sit-down reception is an artificial forum where one is presented with a limited number of persons with whom he can hold a conversation. — Jerzy Kosinski

[Nabokov's] language is made visible ... like a veil or transparent curtain. You cannot help seeing the curtain as you peek into the intimate rooms behind. — Jerzy Kosinski

I suppress in my prose any language which calls attention to itself. — Jerzy Kosinski

I write for a certain sphere of readers in the United States who on average watch seven and a half hours of multichannel television per day. — Jerzy Kosinski

I don't fret over lost time - I can always use the situations in a novel. — Jerzy Kosinski

No one can help me find answers, least of all someone who claims he's found a solution to life. — Jerzy Kosinski

Chance waited patiently until she stopped. — Jerzy Kosinski

My cynicism continuously undermines her faith in her own ability to master her moods. — Jerzy Kosinski

As I go to sleep I remember what my father said-that one can never be sure if one will awake. The way my health is now, this is becoming more and more real. — Jerzy Kosinski

There were innumerable selves that he evoked in her. — Jerzy Kosinski

I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity — Jerzy Kosinski

There is serenity and calm under the water's surface. You move easily and glimpse a world you have never seen before. You think of running out of oxygen and the idea of sharks dart out at you. You sense that there is something treacherous hiding behind every reef; no matter how much you explore you won't ever know what it is. — Jerzy Kosinski

Living is an arbitrary matter and I have every right to renounce it. — Jerzy Kosinski

I wondered whether the loss of one's sight would deprive a person also of the memory of everything that he had seen before. If so, the man would no longer be able to see even in his dreams. if not, if only the eyeless could still see through their memory, it would not be too bad. The world seemed to be pretty much the same everywhere, and even though people differed from one another, just as animals and trees did, one should know fairly well what they looked like after seeing them for years. I had lived only seven years, but I remembered a lot of things. when I closed my eyes, many details cam back still more vividly. who knows, perhaps without his eyes the plowboy would start seeing an entirely new, more fascinating world. — Jerzy Kosinski

There must be no worse punishment to a totalitarian nation than the withdrawal of capital. — Jerzy Kosinski

My choice of a life of adventure may well have been a result of the fact that action raised my blood pressure giving me enough energy to live. — Jerzy Kosinski

She seemed to belong to that pagan, primitive kingdom of birds and forests where everything was infinitely abundant, wild, blooming, and royal in its perpetual decay, death, and rebirth; illicit and clashing with the human world. — Jerzy Kosinski

If we reduce social life to the smallest possible unit we will find that there is no social life in the company of one. — Jerzy Kosinski

Freezing kills the flavor. — Jerzy Kosinski

Wouldn't it be easier to change people's eyes and hair than to build big furnaces and then catch Jews and Gypsies to burn them? — Jerzy Kosinski

In my photographs it is apparent that there was no posing at the moment I released the shutter. — Jerzy Kosinski

As a child I used to lie on the floor with my eyes tightly closed and hope that people would walk past without noticing me. That would mean I was truly invisible. — Jerzy Kosinski

He had found the one calm place in the midst of the storm, a quiet voice calling him to earth. — Jerzy Kosinski

I do like to live in other people's homes. I enjoy being a guest. I am an inexpensive guest. When one lives in another's home he can enter into the psychic kingdom of that person. — Jerzy Kosinski

Accents don't show up in music. — Jerzy Kosinski

A trait which differentiated New York from European cities was the incredible freedom and ease in which life, including sexual life, could be carried on, on many levels. — Jerzy Kosinski

It seems that what I really want is a drug that will increase my consciousness of others, not myself. — Jerzy Kosinski

The principle of art is to pause, not bypass. The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. This requires a moment of pause
a contract with yourself through the object you look at or the page you read. In that moment of pause, I think life expands. And really the purpose of art
for me, of fiction
is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have. That is the moment of finding something which you have not known about yourself, or your environment, about others and about life. — Jerzy Kosinski

So this is insanity. How interesting. What happens next? — Jerzy Kosinski

Mapplethorpe presented the body as a sexual object, separating it from the humanity of the person. He added nothing to photography as a medium. I hold his work in low regard. — Jerzy Kosinski

I am inspired by human sexuality. The act itself is mechanical and holds little interest to me. — Jerzy Kosinski

No big corporation would promote a hunchback. — Jerzy Kosinski

Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self. — Jerzy Kosinski

Of all mammals, only a human being can say 'no. — Jerzy Kosinski

It is not sex by itself that interests me, but its particular role in American consciousness, and in my own life. — Jerzy Kosinski

Had it been possible for me to fix the plane permanently in the sky, to defy the winds and clouds and all the forces pushing it upward and pulling it earthward, I would have willingly done so. I would have stayed in my seat with my eyes closed, all strength and passion gone, my mind as quiescent as a coat rack under a forgotten hat, and I would have remained there, timeless, unmeasured, unjudged, bothering no one, suspended forever between my past and my future. — Jerzy Kosinski

In London, the weather would affect me negatively. I react strongly to light. If it is cloudy and raining, there are clouds and rain in my soul. — Jerzy Kosinski

I deserve no punishment at all for being who I am. — Jerzy Kosinski

There should be no promise of a plot. Plot is extraordinary, while chance is ordinary. — Jerzy Kosinski

When people claim to know who I am, I can no longer act freely. — Jerzy Kosinski

Take whatever you can from others, and when there is nothing left, forget about them. — Jerzy Kosinski

Life is a state of mind. — Jerzy Kosinski

I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time. — Jerzy Kosinski

The native calls the baobab 'the devil tree' because he claims that the devil, getting tangled in its branches, punished by the tree by reversing it. To the native, the roots are branches now, and the branches are roots. To ensure that there would be no more baobabs, the devil destroyed all the young ones. — Jerzy Kosinski

Chance was to work in the garden, where he would care for plants and grasses and trees which grew there peacefully. He would be as one on them: quiet, open hearted in the sunshine and heavy when it rained. — Jerzy Kosinski

I collect human relationships very much the way others collect fine art. — Jerzy Kosinski

Take a look at the books other people have in their homes. — Jerzy Kosinski

And really the purpose of art - for me, fiction - is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have. — Jerzy Kosinski

Karen told me about an old woman who was the last surviving inhabitant of one of the Hermit Islands. She was the only one left who could speak her tribe's language, but the anthropologists didn't realize it and never bothered to learn it from her. When the old woman died, the language died with her. — Jerzy Kosinski

- Growth has its season. There are spring and summer, but there are also fall and winter. And then spring and summer again. As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all be well. — Jerzy Kosinski

Banks introduced the installment plan. The disappearance of cash and the coming of the credit card changed the shape of life in the United States. — Jerzy Kosinski

We know our lives are chaotic, but we insist that everything happen in an orderly way and be logically conceived. — Jerzy Kosinski

I have always suspected everyone who likes me of having poor judgment. I despise them for being so easily taken in. — Jerzy Kosinski

Ruined chimneys rose above masses of broken bricks — Jerzy Kosinski

It mattered little if one was mute; people did not understand one another anyway. They collided with or charmed one another, hugged or trampled one another, but everyone knew only himself. His emotions, memory, and senses divided him from others as effectively as thick reeds screen the mainstream from the muddy bank. Like the mountain peaks around us, we looked at one another, separated by valleys, too high to stay unnoticed, too low to touch the heavens. — Jerzy Kosinski

In a garden, things grow ... but first, they must wither; trees have to lose their leaves in order to put forth new leaves, and to grow thicker and stronger and taller. Some trees die, but fresh saplings replace them. Gardens need a lot of care. But if you love your garden, you don't mind working in it, and waiting. Then in the proper season you will surely see it flourish. — Jerzy Kosinski

As a boy I got the idea that death was an animal which lay curled inside waiting to swallow us. — Jerzy Kosinski

I was pushing myself to extremes in order to discover my many selves. — Jerzy Kosinski

All my father saw was what he wanted to see. — Jerzy Kosinski

The recent Dictionary of Occupational Titles lists over twenty thousand specialized professions in America; being a millionaire is not one of them. — Jerzy Kosinski

Photography was the first foreign language of my artistic expression. — Jerzy Kosinski

One day he trapped a large raven, whose wings he painted red, the breast green, and the tail blue. When a flock of ravens appeared over our hut, Lekh freed the painted bird. As soon as it joined the flock a desperate battle began. The changeling was attacked from all sides. Black, red, green, blue feathers began to drop at our feet. The ravens ran amuck in the skies, and suddenly the painted raven plummeted to the freshly-plowed soil. It was still alive, opening its beak and vainly trying to move its wings. Its eyes had been pecked out, and fresh blood streamed over its painted feathers. It made yet another attempt to flutter up from the sticky earth, but its strength was gone. — Jerzy Kosinski

I write when I feel like it, and I feel like it most of the time. — Jerzy Kosinski

There's a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return. I suspect that whenever I articulate my thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden. — Jerzy Kosinski

Our language has lost its ability to convey the spontaneous. — Jerzy Kosinski