Jerzy Kosiński > Quotes

“I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity”
― Jerzy Kosiński

“There's a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return. I suspect that whenever I articulate my thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Painted Bird

“It seems that what I really want is a drug that will increase my consciousness of others, not myself.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Painted Bird

“Can the imagination, any more than the boy, be held prisoner ?"

- from the foreword to the 1976 edition of "The Painted Bird”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Painted Bird

“growth has its season.There are spring and summer,but there are also fall and winter.And then spring and summer again.As long as the roots are not severed,all is well and all be well”
― Jerzy Kosiński, Being There

“Life is a state of mind.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, Being There

“I always have a sense of trembling, but so does a compass, after all.”
― Jerzy Kosiński

“I wondered whether the loss of one's sight would deprive a person also of the memory of everything that he had seen before. If so, the man would no longer be able to see even in his dreams. if not, if only the eyeless could still see through their memory, it would not be too bad. The world seemed to be pretty much the same everywhere, and even though people differed from one another, just as animals and trees did, one should know fairly well what they looked like after seeing them for years. I had lived only seven years, but I remembered a lot of things. when I closed my eyes, many details cam back still more vividly. who knows, perhaps without his eyes the plowboy would start seeing an entirely new, more fascinating world.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Painted Bird

“Wouldn't it be easier to change people's eyes and hair than to build big furnaces and then catch Jews and Gypsies to burn them?”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Painted Bird

“Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life”
― Jerzy Kosiński

“The recent Dictionary of Occupational Titles lists over twenty thousand specialized professions in America; being a millionaire is not one of them.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, The Devil Tree