Top 100 Kosinski Quotes

#1. You won't believe how many people have congratulated me around the world for shooting a movie in 2D. It's bizarre. It's the strangest thing.

Joseph Kosinski

#2. My cynicism continuously undermines her faith in her own ability to master her moods.

Jerzy Kosinski

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. I write when I feel like it, and I feel like it most of the time.

Jerzy Kosinski

#6. Ruined chimneys rose above masses of broken bricks

Jerzy Kosinski

#7. 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. I deserve no punishment at all for being who I am.

Jerzy Kosinski

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

Jerzy Kosinski

#10. As a director, if you know what you want, then it's not scary.

Joseph Kosinski

#11. Life is a state of mind.

Jerzy Kosinski

#12. There are a lot of limitations so you have to ultimately focus on what you think the most important storyline is.

Joseph Kosinski

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

Jerzy Kosinski

#14. So this is insanity. How interesting. What happens next?

Jerzy Kosinski

#15. I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity

Jerzy Kosinski

#16. A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

Jerzy Kosinski

#17. I always have a sense of trembling, but so does a compass, after all.

Jerzy Kosinski

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

Jerzy Kosinski

#19. I am inspired by human sexuality. The act itself is mechanical and holds little interest to me.

Jerzy Kosinski

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. Listen, whatever makes the movie better. That's the attitude you have to have.

Joseph Kosinski

#23. Living is an arbitrary matter and I have every right to renounce it.

Jerzy Kosinski

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. Our language has lost its ability to convey the spontaneous.

Jerzy Kosinski

#27. I always say, 'If you're planning on seeing our movie, don't look at any more of the materials.'

Joseph Kosinski

#28. The movies I make and my interests are always about pushing the technology as far as we can in support of telling great stories and showing an audience things they haven't seen before.

Joseph Kosinski

#29. In a science fiction movie, the first act is a little longer than it is in most movies because there is so much world building to do.

Joseph Kosinski

#30. For me the Blu-ray version is kind of the definitive version of the movie.

Joseph Kosinski

#31. You want the film to be critically successful - you certainly want the film to be financially successful so that you can ... well, because that's how movies like this are made, you know, they need to make money. But as a director, you can only make the movie that you want to make.

Joseph Kosinski

#32. 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

#33. There must be no worse punishment to a totalitarian nation than the withdrawal of capital.

Jerzy Kosinski

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. I love movies that ask big questions but don't necessarily answer everything. I like people walking out thinking about something.

Joseph Kosinski

#37. You don't die in the United States, you underachieve.

Jerzy Kosinski

#38. I suppress in my prose any language which calls attention to itself.

Jerzy Kosinski

#39. I'm a huge electronic-music fan.

Joseph Kosinski

#40. 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

#41. I don't fret over lost time - I can always use the situations in a novel.

Jerzy Kosinski

#42. 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

#43. Well I grew up in the Midwest, and I think the first film that blew my mind was 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.'

Joseph Kosinski

#44. Can the imagination, any more than the boy, be held prisoner ?"
- from the foreword to the 1976 edition of "The Painted Bird

Jerzy Kosinski

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. I grew up in a place where no one knew anyone in the entertainment business, I never knew it was an actual career.

Joseph Kosinski

#48. I went to school for engineering, I studied jazz. So I always had this kind of creative side and technical side, and I thought architecture might be the way to combine them, so I went to architecture school in New York.

Joseph Kosinski

#49. Tom [Cruise] is a great producer himself. He's got great sense of story. It's always great to have the perspective of the person who's playing the character in your film.

Joseph Kosinski

#50. Physical comfort has nothing to do with any other comfort.

Jerzy Kosinski

#51. 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

#52. An established property can be a blessing and a challenge. On one hand you have all those fans of the original that you can pick up with and continue on with but then you have a lot of people out there who haven't seen the first and might feel like this isn't a movie for them because of that.

Joseph Kosinski

#53. 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

#54. Take whatever you can from others, and when there is nothing left, forget about them.

Jerzy Kosinski

#55. 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

#56. Take a look at the books other people have in their homes.

Jerzy Kosinski

#57. Freezing kills the flavor.

Jerzy Kosinski

#58. Of all mammals, only a human being can say 'no.

Jerzy Kosinski

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

Jerzy Kosinski

#60. I'd like to have the script in a much better place from day one of shooting, rather than trying to continue to work on it while you shoot it. I think those are lessons you learn on any film.

Joseph Kosinski

#61. Certainly there's pressure while your making the movie.

Joseph Kosinski

#62. Disney's clearly in the business of doing giant tent pole movies based on properties that they own. And that's what they should be doing because they're great at doing that.

Joseph Kosinski

#63. 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

#64. Persons who have been homeless carry within them a certain philosophy of life which makes them apprehensive about ownership.

Jerzy Kosinski

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

Jerzy Kosinski

#66. [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

#67. I was always looking for a career that could combine my creative interests with my technical side, and it ends up directing films is the perfect combination.

Joseph Kosinski

#68. No big corporation would promote a hunchback.

Jerzy Kosinski

#69. It's important to listen to those around you, and ultimately you have to decide which path you're going to go down.

Joseph Kosinski

#70. Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life

Jerzy Kosinski

#71. 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

#72. When people claim to know who I am, I can no longer act freely.

Jerzy Kosinski

#73. For me, I feel like, between 'Tron' and 'Oblivion,' I've gotten to fulfill my 'Star Wars' fantasies, in a way.

Joseph Kosinski

#74. Technology can do amazing things for us. It's something we need to keep an eye on.

Joseph Kosinski

#75. 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

#76. Of course there are always exceptions, but opinions are not to be feared.

Joseph Kosinski

#77. I was pushing myself to extremes in order to discover my many selves.

Jerzy Kosinski

#78. I don't think every movie should be made in 3-D, and it should depend on whether it's one of these films that's more immersive or needs to be taken to another world. I'm interested in other formats.

Joseph Kosinski

#79. Travel gives me the opportunity to walk through the sectors of cities where one can clearly see the passage of time.

Jerzy Kosinski

#80. That's why she keeps her nails long, she says, to be able to scratch and claw.

Jerzy Kosinski

#81. Once I got out of architecture school I decided not to be an architect, I just started my own little design studio.

Joseph Kosinski

#82. Chance waited patiently until she stopped.

Jerzy Kosinski

#83. - 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

#84. Going around under an umbrella interferes with one's looking up at the sky.

Jerzy Kosinski

#85. Sometimes with these things all the pieces fall into place. I mean, we've been talking about this for years and we don't have the script now, but sometimes things fall into place very quickly, and if everything lines up it could happen.

Joseph Kosinski

#86. I think some people are under the impression that you can simply just shoot it on blue, and then it's all done in post. But no, you really need to understand the pipeline, from beginning to end.

Joseph Kosinski

#87. When you make a movie, you can only make the movie that you would want to see.

Joseph Kosinski

#88. I don't wear glasses, so I like the idea of not having to put them on to watch a movie. It's a hard barrier to get beyond.

Joseph Kosinski

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

Jerzy Kosinski

#90. I am curious about grownups, not children.

Jerzy Kosinski

#91. All my father saw was what he wanted to see.

Jerzy Kosinski

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

Jerzy Kosinski

#93. 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

#94. The commercial music video industry is very hard to break into, and until you break in, that first job is the hardest thing in the world to get.

Joseph Kosinski

#95. It's a fine line to find that balance: to show people enough to give them the promise of something unique, and something they want to see, but at the same time make sure that when they show up for the movie, they're surprised by what they eventually get.

Joseph Kosinski

#96. Hopefully, great science fiction films help you think about issues that relate to yourself, whether it's: What's my purpose? Why am I here? What is it that makes me who I am? Those are the kind of questions my favorite science fiction films ask.

Joseph Kosinski

#97. All my life I've been hiding.

Jerzy Kosinski

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. You never want to intentionally make a confusing movie.

Joseph Kosinski

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