Quotes from Jerzy Kosinski

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.

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.

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

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.

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

All my life I've been hiding.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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