Jerzy Kosinski Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

I felt lost in this maze. In the world into which Gavrila was initiating me, human aspirations and expectations were entangled with each other like the roots and branches of great trees in a thick forest, each tree struggling for more moisture from the soil and more sunshine from the sky.

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.

[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.

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

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

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

I am curious about grownups, not children.

- 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.

People prefer to avoid confronting deformity and when they do it's only for kicks.

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.

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

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

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

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

Accents don't show up in music.

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.

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

What about the war?' the young woman sitting on Chance's left said, leaning close to him.

'The war? Which war?' said Chance. 'I've seen many wars on TV.'

'Alas,' the woman said, 'in this country, when we dream of reality television wakes us. To millions the war, I suppose, is just another TV program. But out there, at the front, real men are giving their lives.

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

No big corporation would promote a hunchback.

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.

All my life I've been hiding.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Photography was the first foreign language of my artistic expression.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Do you realize that one out of every four Americans is unbalanced? Think of your three closest friends. If they seem normal, then you are the one.

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.

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

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

All my father saw was what he wanted to see.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There were innumerable selves that he evoked in her.

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