Quotes from Jerzy Kosi?ski

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

Furthermore, the world of books, like meat in cans, was somehow richer and more flavorful than the everyday variety. In ordinary life, for example, one saw many people without really knowing them, while in books one even knew what people were thinking and planning.

There was no God, no Holy Trinity, no devils, ghosts, or ghouls rising from graves; there was no Death flying everywhere in search of new sinners to snare. These were all tales for ignorant people who did not understand the natural order of the world, did not believe in their own powers, and therefore had to take refuge in their belief in some God.

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.

We did our best to understand the murder: the murderer was a part of our lives; not so the victim.

There should be no promise of a plot. Plot is extraordinary, while chance is ordinary.

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

Accents don't show up in music.

The native calls the baobab 'the devil tree' because he claims that the devil, getting tangled in its branches, punished by the tree by reversing it. To the native, the roots are branches now, and the branches are roots. To ensure that there would be no more baobabs, the devil destroyed all the young ones.

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

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

At first I was afraid that I would be left defenseless, that I would babble aloud the things I've always been terrified of saying. Instead, opium made me realize that I could say anything I liked without losing my identity.

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.

Perhaps the world would soon become one vast incinerator for burning people.

Karen told me about an old woman who was the last surviving inhabitant of one of the Hermit Islands. She was the only one left who could speak her tribe's language, but the anthropologists didn't realize it and never bothered to learn it from her. When the old woman died, the language died with her.

No big corporation would promote a hunchback.

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.

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.

We know our lives are chaotic, but we insist that everything happen in an orderly way and be logically conceived.

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

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

Freezing kills the flavor.

There were innumerable selves that he evoked in her.

May God keep the beautiful women safe from people with wild imagination.