Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

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

Isaac Bashevis Singer
A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise… Because that is how life is — full of surprises.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
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.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
Buildings will collapse, power plants will stop generating electricity. Generals will drop atomic bombs on their own populations. Mad revolutionaries will run in the streets, crying fantastic slogans. I have often thought it would begin in New York. This metropolis has all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
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.

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

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

Isaac Bashevis Singer
We all play chess with Fate as partner. He makes a move, we make a move. He tries to checkmate us in three moves, we try to prevent it. We know we can't win, but we're driven to give him a good fight.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
I am not ashamed to admit that I belong to those who fantasize that literature is capable of bringing new horizons and new perspectives — philosophical, religious, aesthetical and even social. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
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.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
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.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
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.

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

Isaac Bashevis Singer
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.

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

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

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

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
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. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love. The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
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. 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.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
There are some who call Yiddish a dead language, but so was Hebrew called for two thousand years. It has been revived in our time in a most remarkable, almost miraculous way. Aramaic was certainly a dead language for centuries but then it brought to light the Zohar, a work of mysticism of sublime value.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
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.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
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.

Isaac Bashevis Singer