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

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

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

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

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.
Jerzy Kosinski

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

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

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

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

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


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

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.
Jerzy Kosinski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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