Isaac Bashevis Singer
63 quotes
Biography
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born Jewish American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, and translator in the United States. Some of his works were adapted for the theater.
"Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression."
"A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises."
"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."
"Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it’s dark"
"Kindness, I’ve discovered, is everything in life."
"When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer."
"We have to believe in free-will. We've got no choice."
"Shoulders are from God, and burdens too."
"We must believe in free will — we have no choice."
"I am thankful, of course, for the prize and thankful to God for each story, each idea, each word, each day."
"I don't invent characters because the Almightly has already invented millions… Just like experts at fingerprints do not create fingerprints but learn how to read them."
"The analysis of character is the highest human entertainment."
"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."
"Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge."
"Even in love, people betray themselves. And when you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself. I would say a great part of human history is a history of self-betrayal and betrayal of others."
"Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology... 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 illusions."
"We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children."
"Take three quarts of duck's milk..."
"If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments."
"Vegetarianism is my religion. I became a consistent vegetarian some twenty-three years ago. Before that, I would try over and over again. But it was sporadic. Finally, in the mid-1960s, I made up my mind. And I've been a vegetarian ever since. 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. … This is my protest against the conduct of the world. To be a vegetarian is to disagree — to disagree with the course of things today. Nuclear power, starvation, cruelty — we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one."
"I started to "write" even before I knew the alphabet. I would dip a pen in ink and scribble. I also liked to draw — horses, houses, dogs. The Sabbath was an ordeal for me, because it is forbidden to write on that day."
"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."
"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. Nevertheless, it is also true that the serious writer of our time must be deeply concerned about the problems of his generation. He cannot but see that the power of religion, especially belief in revelation, is weaker today than it was in any other epoch in human history. More and more children grow up without faith in God, without belief in reward and punishment, in the immortality of the soul and even in the validity of ethics. The genuine writer cannot ignore the fact that the family is losing its spiritual foundation."
"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. In their despair a number of those who no longer have confidence in the leadership of our society look up to the writer, the master of words. They hope against hope that the man of talent and sensitivity can perhaps rescue civilization. Maybe there is a spark of the prophet in the artist after all."
"I have many times resigned myself to never finding a true way out. But a new hope always emerges telling me that it is not yet too late for all of us to take stock and make a decision. I was brought up to believe in free will."