Jerzy Kosinski Quotes

There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.

In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

Be able to describe anything visual, such as a street scene, in words that convey your meaning.

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.

You can read my stuff; there are not very many quotes. It's more impressionistic.

I don't usually like teen novels written in the present tense, particularly those told from a first-person viewpoint. Too many writers seem to believe that using either or both devices automatically imbues their stories with deep seriousness and a contemporary feel.

Beginning 'Beloved' with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city.

In most writers, style is a welcome, an invitation, a letting down of the drawbridge between the artist and the world. Shaw had no time for such ruses. Unlike most of his countrymen, he abominated charm, which he regarded as evidence of chronic temperamental weakness.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

I've always written in first person. It gives the readers more insight.

Michael Ondaatje’s work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully curated vignettes. All his books were odd, all of them ‘unfinished’ the way Chopin’s Études are unfinished: no wasted gestures, no unnecessary notes.

So, then, what is style? There are two chief aspects of any piece of writing: 1) what you say and 2) how you say it. The former is "content" and the latter is "style."

And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.

In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.

If you think of even Tolstoy or a book like 'Anna Karenina,' you go from character to character, and each section is from the third person perspective of a different character, so you get to see the whole world a little more kaleidoscopically that way. That's traditional narrative manner, and I haven't done a book like that before, but I enjoyed it.

I'll paint you moments of gold, I'll spin you Valentine evenings.

The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul.

I am a big fan of Dos Passos' stylistic ability, his poetic approach to prose, but the ideas presented in the songs are quite different from those which he exemplified.