Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes

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. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.

While the poet entertains he continues to search for eternal truths, for the essence of being. In his own fashion he tries to solve the riddle of time and change, to find an answer to suffering, to reveal love in the very abyss of cruelty and injustice. Strange as these words may sound I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet--whom Plato banned from his Republic--may rise up to save us all.

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.

Every body resisted (the slaughterer) in its own fashion, tried to escape and seemed to argue with the Creator to its last breath.

Two important things are to have a genuine interest in people and to be kind to them. Kindness, I've discovered, is everything.

What a strange power there is in clothing.

All that God does is for the good.

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

We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children.

In our time, when the literature for adults is deteriorating, good books for children are the only hope, the only refuge.

There is no death. How can there be death if everything is part of the Godhead? The soul never dies and the body is never really alive.

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

Heaven and earth conspire that everything which has been, be rooted and reduced to dust. Only the dreamers, who dream while awake, call back the shadows of the past and braid nets from the unspun thread.

There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.

In many ways, astrology, numerology and palmistry are corruptions of the occult because they have attempted to make a practice out of something that is essentially imaginative.

There is a permanent amnesia planted in us, which just as we keep forgetting our dreams, we sometimes keep on forgetting our reality.

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

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

The storyteller and poet of our time, as in any other time, must be an entertainer of the spirit in the full sense of the word, not just a preacher of social or political ideals. There is no paradise for bored readers and no excuse for tedious literature that does not intrigue the reader, uplift him, give him the joy and the escape that true art always grants.

I know as a writer how valuable a tool is the wastebasket. Perhaps God throws away many experiments before He finds the right expression. Perhaps we are the discards - or we could be the part He keeps. This mystery is what keeps us all going, to see what happens in the next chapter.

Literature has neglected the old and their emotions. The novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience.

When literature becomes overly erudite, it means that interest in the art has gone and curiosity about the artist is what's important. It becomes a kind of idolatry.

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself.

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

Sometimes love is stronger than a man's convictions.

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

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.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love... In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.