Time & Perspective Quote by Jerzy Kosinski

Kosinski’s line is a tidy act of self-defense dressed up as a worldview: he raids the past like a locked pantry, then refuses the future beyond dinner. The cadence matters. “Past history” is redundant on purpose, an overpacked phrase that sounds like someone double-checking the door is bolted. He isn’t just remembering; he’s inventorying. Calling it “stored experiences” turns life into an archive, something boxed and shelved, safe to handle at arm’s length. Then he slips in “products of the imagination,” blurring memoir and fabrication with a shrug. For a novelist with a reputation shadowed by questions of authorship and appropriation, that ambiguity reads less like poetic flourish than a tell: the past is useful precisely because it can be edited.

The second sentence lands like a punchline with a bruise underneath. “I look no further forward than the evening” compresses the future to a single, manageable unit of time - not a life plan, not even a week, just the next few hours. It’s darkly comic, but the comedy is the kind that keeps panic from showing. In the late-20th-century register of exile, trauma, and media-saturated anxiety, long-range optimism can feel like an indulgence or a lie. Kosinski’s speaker chooses a tighter horizon: survival as schedule.

Subtext: the future is where accountability and uncertainty live. The past, even when partly invented, can be curated into a story. The evening is all you can control.