Jerzy Kosinski Quotes

The desire to impress is an efficient means of bringing out one’s least impressive qualities.

When I paint, I seriously consider the public presence of a person - the surface facade. I am less concerned with how people look when they wake up or how they act at home. A person's public presence reflects his own efforts at image development.

I think anyone doing an interview is to some extent on show. And therefore, we always want to put on our best face.

Celebrity seems totally at odds with authentic community and honest, real sorts of relationships.

I had become a perfect fake human, saying the stupid and pointless things that humans say to each other all day long.

Some persons' letters seem almost framed to afford a series of alibis for their personality.

We tend to tell strangers what we think will make us sound good. I myself, to my utter amazement, informed a telephone pollster that I exercised regularly, a bare-faced lie.

We're all products of what we want to project to the world. Even people who don't spend any time, or think they don't, on preparing themselves for the world out there - I think that ultimately they have for their whole lives groomed themselves to be a certain way, to present a face to the world.

It's all about impressing people.

In our lives in a lot of ways it's all about fake. You've got people wanting things for fake reasons.

Modesty and unselfishness - these are the virtues which men praise - and pass by.

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.

A single moment spent in a business meeting or at a pub is more than enough to reveal the basic human truth that we are all faking it most of the time. We congratulate a rival on a triumph when actually we are choking on spite. We are cordial and attentive to crashing bores.

I don't like LA. The majority just seem to be so artificial. Look at how they worship everything they think is fashionable. Isn't it sick?

I'm not painting myself as a down-home, modest guy.

You can't please everyone, and you can't make everyone like you.

People know when you're frontin'.

There's nothing less funny than someone who looks cool. There's nothing more unappealing.

Ronald Reagan had a kind of shallow movie-star charisma - a combination of makeup and the skill of a good actor - but it wasn't the real thing, and was something that he could turn off when the cameras weren't running.

I try to look cool. I strategize. Sometimes it's like - that's part of the strategizing, to make it seem like I don't think about it.

In all professions each affects a look and an exterior to appear what he wishes the world to believe that he is. Thus we may say that the whole world is made up of appearances.

I don't trust people who are likable.

I used to be quite laid back and that. But obviously the more you're in the public eye, the more you've got to... dress to impress.

It's still thrilling, even if my work is something that people even pretend they're interested in on a first date or at a cocktail party.

To establish oneself in the world, one does all one can to seem established there already.