Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes

We must believe in free will - we have no choice.

In the half darkness I winked to my other self, my mad dictator, and congratulated him on his droll victory. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth flowing from Shosha's head to my face. What did I have to lose? Nothing more than what everyone loses anyway.

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")

In God's mill even chaff becomes flour.

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.

What's the good of not believing? Today it's your wife you don't believe; tomorrow it's God Himself you won't take stock in.

While facts never become obsolete or stale, commentaries always do.

There will never be any peace in the world as long as we eat animals.

There is great treasure there behind our skull and this is true about all of us. This little treasure has great, great powers, and I would say we only have learnt a very, very small part of what it can do.

One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality.

It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.

The soul never dies and the body is never really alive.

As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis.

Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.

What nature creates has eternity in it.

Actually, the true story of a person's life can never be written. It is beyond the power of literature. The full tale of any life would be both utterly boring and utterly unbelievable.

The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.

Various philosophers and religious leaders tried to convince their disciples and followers that animals are nothing more than machines without a soul, without feelings. However, anyone who has ever lived with an animal-be it a dog, a bird, or even a mouse-knows that this theory is a brazen lie, invented to justify cruelty.

Whatever doesn't really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn't happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year.

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

It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning names.

What do these children do without storybooks?" Naftali asked. And Reb Zebulun replied: "They have to make do. Storybooks aren't bread. You can live without them." I couldn't live without them." Naftali said.

Even in the worm that crawls in the earth there glows a divine spark. When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter God.

To me the Yiddish language and the conduct of those who spoke it are identical.

From borrowing one gets poorer and from work one gets richer.

We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.

A Marxist has never written a good novel.

It is written, better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil. You are not a fool. They are the fools. For he who causes his neighbor to feel shame loses Paradise himself.

The New England conscience doesn't keep you from doing what you shouldn't - it just keeps you from enjoying it.

Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about critics.

God is a writer and we are both the heroes and the readers.

There are 500 reasons I write for children.... Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about the critics.... They don't read to free themselves of guilt, to quench their thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... They don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions.

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

We are all God's creatures-that we pray to God for mercy and justice while we continue to eat the flesh of animals that are slaughtered on our account is not consistent.

No lepidopterist's collection in the entire world...full if iridescent wings, is worth the life of a single butterfly.

Shoulders are from God and burdens too.

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.

I was brought up to believe in free will. Although I came to doubt all revelation, I can never accept the idea that the Universe is a physical or chemical accident, a result of blind evolution. Even though I learned to recognize the lies, the clichés and the idolatries of the human mind, I still cling to some truths which I think all of us might accept some day.

Some of my cronies call me a pessimist and a decadent, but there is always a background of faith behind resignation.

A story to me must have some surprise...I must have a passion to write the story.

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

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

The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly.

When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice.

There must be a way for man to attain all possible pleasures, all the powers and knowledge that nature can grant him, and still serve God--a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the Cosmos.

When a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why should man then expect mercy from God? It's unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give.

What happened was no accident. Everything was preordained. True, the will was free, but heaven also made its ordinances.

No technological achievements can mitigate the disappointment of modern man, his loneliness, his feeling of inferiority, and his fear of war, revolution and terror. Not only has our generation lost faith in Providence but also in man himself, in his institutions and often in those who are nearest to him.