Top 85 Jerzy Kosinski Quotes
#1. My cynicism continuously undermines her faith in her own ability to master her moods.
Jerzy Kosinski
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. I write when I feel like it, and I feel like it most of the time.
Jerzy Kosinski
#6. 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
#8. As a boy I got the idea that death was an animal which lay curled inside waiting to swallow us.
Jerzy Kosinski
#10. I have always suspected everyone who likes me of having poor judgment. I despise them for being so easily taken in.
Jerzy Kosinski
#11. So this is insanity. How interesting. What happens next?
Jerzy Kosinski
#12. I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity
Jerzy Kosinski
#13. A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.
Jerzy Kosinski
#14. I always have a sense of trembling, but so does a compass, after all.
Jerzy Kosinski
#15. The recent Dictionary of Occupational Titles lists over twenty thousand specialized professions in America; being a millionaire is not one of them.
Jerzy Kosinski
#16. I am inspired by human sexuality. The act itself is mechanical and holds little interest to me.
Jerzy Kosinski
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Living is an arbitrary matter and I have every right to renounce it.
Jerzy Kosinski
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Our language has lost its ability to convey the spontaneous.
Jerzy Kosinski
#23. 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
#24. There must be no worse punishment to a totalitarian nation than the withdrawal of capital.
Jerzy Kosinski
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. You don't die in the United States, you underachieve.
Jerzy Kosinski
#28. I suppress in my prose any language which calls attention to itself.
Jerzy Kosinski
#29. 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
#30. I don't fret over lost time - I can always use the situations in a novel.
Jerzy Kosinski
#31. 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
#32. Can the imagination, any more than the boy, be held prisoner ?"
- from the foreword to the 1976 edition of "The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Physical comfort has nothing to do with any other comfort.
Jerzy Kosinski
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Take whatever you can from others, and when there is nothing left, forget about them.
Jerzy Kosinski
#39. 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
#40. Take a look at the books other people have in their homes.
Jerzy Kosinski
#43. It is not sex by itself that interests me, but its particular role in American consciousness, and in my own life.
Jerzy Kosinski
#44. 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
#45. Persons who have been homeless carry within them a certain philosophy of life which makes them apprehensive about ownership.
Jerzy Kosinski
#46. The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author.
Jerzy Kosinski
#47. [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
#49. Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life
Jerzy Kosinski
#50. 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
#51. When people claim to know who I am, I can no longer act freely.
Jerzy Kosinski
#52. 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
#53. I was pushing myself to extremes in order to discover my many selves.
Jerzy Kosinski
#54. Travel gives me the opportunity to walk through the sectors of cities where one can clearly see the passage of time.
Jerzy Kosinski
#55. That's why she keeps her nails long, she says, to be able to scratch and claw.
Jerzy Kosinski
#57. - 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
#58. Going around under an umbrella interferes with one's looking up at the sky.
Jerzy Kosinski
#59. It is possible to stand around with a cocktail in one's hand and talk with everyone, which means with no one.
Jerzy Kosinski
#62. We know our lives are chaotic, but we insist that everything happen in an orderly way and be logically conceived.
Jerzy Kosinski
#63. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Photography was the first foreign language of my artistic expression.
Jerzy Kosinski
#68. I do not gather things, I prefer to rent them rather than to possess them.
Jerzy Kosinski
#69. It seems that what I really want is a drug that will increase my consciousness of others, not myself.
Jerzy Kosinski
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. In my photographs it is apparent that there was no posing at the moment I released the shutter.
Jerzy Kosinski
#73. I look back into past history, the stored experiences or products of the imagination. I look no further forward than the evening.
Jerzy Kosinski
#74. 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
#75. There were innumerable selves that he evoked in her.
Jerzy Kosinski
#76. 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
#77. He had found the one calm place in the midst of the storm, a quiet voice calling him to earth.
Jerzy Kosinski
#78. There should be no promise of a plot. Plot is extraordinary, while chance is ordinary.
Jerzy Kosinski
#80. The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.
Jerzy Kosinski
#81. No one can help me find answers, least of all someone who claims he's found a solution to life.
Jerzy Kosinski
#82. I collect human relationships very much the way others collect fine art.
Jerzy Kosinski
#83. She protected herself by making herself believe no-one else could ever really understand her.
Jerzy Kosinski
#84. 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
#85. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
