Best 50 quotes of Jerzy Kosinski on MyQuotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I am curious about grownups, not children.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

[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.

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.

Photography was the first foreign language of my artistic expression.

Physical comfort has nothing to do with any other comfort.

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.

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

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

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.

The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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