Jerzy Kosinski Quotes

When I first read 'The River,' I had theories on what it was about, but once we got into rehearsal, I realized it's much simpler: It's about how human beings try to connect. The play holds a mirror up to the audience, and they take from it what's relevant to their lives.

In the best writers, the outward-reaching interest in the 'found subject' leads back at a hairpin to some uncomfortable inner recognition that the writer has journeyed very far to see; he comes home half-dead.

I love books, and all the best ones are people analysing their own emotions. You can learn from that.

Every country I go to, I learn a little bit more about myself.

Go to foreign countries and you will get to know the good things one possesses at home.

During the long process of history, by relying on our own diligence, courage and wisdom, Chinese people have opened up a good and beautiful home where all ethnic groups live in harmony and fostered an excellent culture that never fades.

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

But what do we know of the heart nearest to our own? What do we know of our own heart?

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

The music I make and the process of acting, for me, are both about trying to understand people and get inside what makes us tick. That's the main thing that excites me. Our sense of who we really are and what drives us.

Airbnb is a company with values around hospitality.

If there is an interpreter sitting between two friends, he may be able to translate the words but not the feelings with which I say something.

Show me one man who knows his own heart, to him I shall belong.

He who recites dramatic works makes discoveries about his own character.

Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.

That is the magic of travel. You leave your home secure in your own knowledge and identity. But as you travel, the world in all it's richness intervenes. You meet people you could not invent; you see scenes you could not imagine. Your own world, which was so large as to consume your whole life, becomes smaller and smaller until it is only one tiny dot in time and space. You return a different person.

Self-knowledge involves relationship. To know oneself is to study one self in action with another person. Relationship is a process of self evaluation and self revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself - to be is to be related.

On this platform of peace, we can create a language to translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

The relationship changes as you learn more about people, and the work sort of takes on its own life. I enjoy this very much.

To relate is to react. To react is to understand oneself. To understand oneself is to be enlightened. Relationships are schools for enlightenment.

The west has decided to channel money and effort into studying other customs and practices, but no one has really given other people the chance to study western customs and practices, except at schools maintained by white expatriates, or by allowing the rich from other cultures to study in Oxford or Paris. What happens then is that they return home to organise fundamentalist movements, because they feel solidarity with those of their compatriots who lack the opportunity for such education.

While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination." (from "The Third and Final Continent")

As far as people communicating with each other well I think that listening is important. You know really trying to read between the lines of what some body is saying and trying to read their mind a little bit where there at because most people don't really say what they're feeling. Which is the bones of great literature.

I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.