Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes

Kindness, I’ve discovered, is everything in life.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

If one knew the truth how could there be freedom? If hell and paradise were in the middle of the marketplace, everyone would be a saint.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

I believe in God but people are liars. It's those people who say they are appointed by God who I don't believe in.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it’s dark

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Shoulders are from God, and burdens too.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don't want to part from it. He had given me a pill of cyanide, He and his wife and their son also carried such pills. We all lived with death, and I want you to know that one can fall in love with death. Whoever has loved death cannot love anything else any more. When the liberation came and they told me to leave, I didn't want to go. I clung to the threshold like an ox being dragged to the slaughter. (Hanka)

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Where do the wheels of history lead? How can you be so sure that the wheels of history won't get bogged down in blood and marrow again?

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

At moments when Herman fantasized about a new metaphysics, or even a new religion, he based everything on the attraction of the sexes. In the beginning was lust. The godly, as well as the human, principle is desire. Gravity, light, magnetism, thought may be aspects of the same universal longing. Suffering, emptiness, darkness are nothing more than interruptions of a cosmic orgasm that grows forever in intensity...

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

But my gloom did not lessen. I knew that I'd had a bad dream, and I stood in the dark trying to recollect it. The second I closed my eyes, I was with the dead. They did things words cannot express. They spoke madness. (Hanka)

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Those who understand the complexities of human nature know that joy and pain, ugliness and beauty, love and hate, mercy and cruelty and other conflicting emotions often blend and cannot be separated from each other.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren't told or books weren't written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day. The whole world, all human life, is one long story.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today... starvation, cruelty - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

A freelance writer is paid per word, per piece, perhaps.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I'm a grown up, they call me a writer.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

When the ship approached the equator, I stopped going out on deck in the daytime. The sun burned like a flame. The days had shortened and night came swiftly. One moment it was light, the next it was dark. The sun did not set but fell into the water like a meteor. Late in the evening, when I went out briefly, a hot wind slapped my face. From the ocean came a roar of passions that seemed to have broken through all barriers:'We mus procreate and multiply! We must exhaust all the powers of lust!' The waves glowed like lava, and I imagined I could see multitudes of living beings - algae, whales, sea monsters - reveling in an orgy, from the surface to the bottom of the sea. Immortality was the law here. The whole planet raged with animation. At times, I heard my name in the clamor: the spirit of the abyss calling me to join them in their nocturnal dance. (Hanka)

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Children have no use for psychology. They detest sociology. They still believe in God the family angels devils witches goblins logic clarity punctuation and other such obsolete stuff. When a book is boring they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity but leave to adults such childish allusions.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Kindness I've discovered is everything in life.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction perhaps illusory that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

The waste basket is a writer's best friend.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Writing has power but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind but they can't direct it. Time changes things God changes things the dictators change things but writers can't change anything.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

A good writer is basically a story-teller not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

I am thankful, of course, for the prize and thankful to God for each story, each idea, each word, each day.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

For those who are willing to make an effort, great miracles and wonderful treasures are in store.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer