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Quotes by Polish Authors

"Every man is responsible only for his own acts. The sons do not inherit the sins of the fathers. But can we say: that was long ago, they were different?"

"No man engaged in a work he does not like can preserve many saving illusionsabout himself. The distaste, the absence of glamour, extend from the occupation to the personality. It is only when ourappointed activities seem by a lucky accident to obey the particular earnestness of our temperament that we can taste the comfort of complete self-deception."

"It is hardly possible to build anything if frustration, bitterness and a mood of helplessness prevail."

"A novelty in Polish filmmaking was that it was possible to find funds for a big production. However, at the same time, the state budget committed less and less money to filmmaking."

"I read the papers every day just to discover if one mentions Anna Held."

"With it adult political audiences abandoned cinemas. In their place appeared a void. That previous political audience migrated to the seats in front of their TV."

"I learned the business in about two months, and then made as much as the others, and was consequently doing quite well when the factory burned down, destroying all our machines - 150 of them. This was very hard on the girls who had paid for their machines."

"The television industry doesn't like to see the compexity of the world. It prefers simple reporting, with simple ideas: this is white, that's black; this is good, that's bad."

"Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions."

"Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore... prove ultimately futile."

"I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones."

"Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life."

"I belong to the generation of workers who, born in the villages and hamlets of rural Poland, had the opportunity to acquire education and find employment in industry, becoming in the course conscious of their rights and importance in society."

"For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness."

"A lot of male actors are method actors and they become the characters which they both were."

"The first requisite for immortality is death."

"Television theatre, as is implied in its name, should rely on adaptations of scripts written for the theatre."

"We welcome, we welcome this good cooperation between Russia and NATO."

"Young people are threatened... by the evil use of advertising techniques that stimulate the natural inclination to avoid hard work by promising the immediate satisfaction of every desire."

"My message to the Americans, to the American President, is that I am coming from Poland, which is in good shape; it is much different than ten years ago when last state visit from Poland was here in the United States."

"May God permit us both to return to a free and independent Poland."

"This homage has been rendered not to me - for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me - but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius."

"This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak-the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning."

"There is no filmmaking legislation because distributors are not interested in sharing their money with the film industry - for instance, by giving a percentage of ticket sales back to filmmakers."

"Why does there exist a global American entertainment industry, but there isn't an equivalent coming from France or Italy? This is the case simply because the English language opens the whole world to the American cinema."

"Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art."
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