Quotes by Jerzy Kosinski

• A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life.
• Going around under an umbrella interferes with one's looking up at the sky.
• 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.
• Persons who have been homeless carry within them a certain philosophy of life which makes them apprehensive about ownership.
• 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.
• Travel gives me the opportunity to walk through the sectors of cities where one can clearly see the passage of time.
• There must be no worse punishment to a totalitarian nation than the withdrawal of capital.
• There are many types of participation. One can observe so intensely that one becomes part of the action, but without being an active participant.
• The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author.
• The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.
• The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.
• 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.
• Physical comfort has nothing to do with any other comfort.
• 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.
• It is possible to stand around with a cocktail in one's hand and talk with everyone, which means with no one.
• I don't fret over lost time - I can always use the situations in a novel.
• I am inspired by human sexuality. The act itself is mechanical and holds little interest to me.
• I collect human relationships very much the way others collect fine art.
• Take a look at the books other people have in their homes.
• I do not gather things, I prefer to rent them rather than to possess them.
• It is not sex by itself that interests me, but its particular role in American consciousness, and in my own life.
• I look back into past history, the stored experiences or products of the imagination. I look no further forward than the evening.
• 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.
• If we reduce social life to the smallest possible unit we will find that there is no social life in the company of one.
• 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 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.