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.Collection: War
Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.Collection: Brainy
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.Collection: Art
Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.Collection: Religion
I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.Collection: Health
I am thankful, of course, for the prize and thankful to God for each story, each idea, each word, each day.Collection: Thankful
When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself.Collection: Wisdom
Life is God's novel. Let him write it.Collection: Life
The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.Collection: Art
Kindness, I've discovered, is everything in life.Collection: Life
What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.Collection: Nature
The waste basket is the writer's best friend.Collection: Communication
If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.Collection: Chance
We must believe in free will, we have no choice.
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.
If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments.
Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.
The second half of the twentieth century is a complete flop.
Sometimes love is stronger than a man's convictions.
For those who are willing to make an effort, great miracles and wonderful treasures are in store.
If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.
A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises.
When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.
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.
We have to believe in free-will. We've got no choice.
The analysis of character is the highest human entertainment.
We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children.
We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.
The New England conscience doesn't keep you from doing what you shouldn't - it just keeps you from enjoying it.
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.
A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
Two important things are to have a genuine interest in people and to be kind to them. Kindness, I've discovered, is everything.Collection: Inspirational
What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.Collection: Men
We must believe in free will - we have no choice.Collection: Believe
It is a general rule that when the grain of truth cannot be found, men will swallow great helpings of falsehood.Collection: Lying
In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Animal
Whenever I'm in trouble, I pray. And because I'm in trouble all of the time, I pray almost constantly.Collection: Prayer
Literature is the memory of humanity.Collection: Memories
Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it’s darkCollection: Dark
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.Collection: Children
Men want all women to lie down as whores and get up as virgins.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Uplifting
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.Collection: Art
All that God does is for the good.Collection: God
There will never be any peace in the world as long as we eat animals.Collection: Animal
Even in the worm that crawls in the earth there glows a divine spark. When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter God.Collection: Love