Time & Perspective Quote by Jerzy Kosinski

Time, for Kosinski, isn’t a moral ledger; it’s raw material. The line performs a neat reversal: where most people treat “lost time” as a private failure or a wound to be mourned, he recasts it as narrative inventory. The verb “fret” is tellingly small and domestic, the kind of anxious buzzing associated with people who believe life is supposed to run on schedule. Kosinski’s narrator-brain simply refuses that premise. If something is wasted, it’s only wasted for those who can’t metabolize it.

The subtext carries a colder edge. “I can always use the situations” implies a practiced extraction: experience becomes “situations,” not memories, not relationships, not pain. It’s an artist’s alchemy and an artist’s opportunism, hinting at the ethically complicated truth that fiction often feeds on real disorder. The self-consolation here isn’t spiritual; it’s professional. The worst day can be redeemed, but only by being turned into copy.

Context matters with Kosinski, a writer whose public persona and work traded heavily in the ambiguity between lived experience and manufactured story. The sentence reads like a craft credo and a defense mechanism: if life is unstable, authorial control offers revenge. Put it in a novel and you get to choose the framing, the villain, the ending. It’s also an implicit flex: the novelist as scavenger of modern chaos, someone who doesn’t seek serenity so much as leverage.