Explore Quotes by 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is a state of mind.