Quotes by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Where do the wheels of history lead? How can you be so sure that the wheels of history wont get bogged down in blood and marrow again?

At moments when Herman fantasized about a new metaphysics, or even a new religion, he based everything on the attraction of the sexes. In the beginning was lust. The godly, as well as the human, principle is desire. Gravity, light, magnetism, thought may be aspects of the same universal longing. Suffering, emptiness, darkness are nothing more than interruptions of a cosmic orgasm that grows forever in intensity...

If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

But my gloom did not lessen. I knew that Id 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)

Those who understand the complexities of human nature know that joy and pain, ugliness and beauty, love and hate, mercy and cruelty and other conflicting emotions often blend and cannot be separated from each other.

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.

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

When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories werent told or books werent written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day. The whole world, all human life, is one long story.

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.

To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today... starvation, cruelty - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think its a strong one.

A freelance writer is paid per word, per piece, perhaps.

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

What a strange power there is in clothing.

When the ship approached the equator, I stopped going out on deck in the daytime. The sun burned like a flame. The days had shortened and night came swiftly. One moment it was light, the next it was dark. The sun did not set but fell into the water like a meteor. Late in the evening, when I went out briefly, a hot wind slapped my face. From the ocean came a roar of passions that seemed to have broken through all barriers:We mus procreate and multiply! We must exhaust all the powers of lust! The waves glowed like lava, and I imagined I could see multitudes of living beings - algae, whales, sea monsters - reveling in an orgy, from the surface to the bottom of the sea. Immortality was the law here. The whole planet raged with animation. At times, I heard my name in the clamor: the spirit of the abyss calling me to join them in their nocturnal dance. (Hanka)

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.

Life is Gods novel. Let him write it.

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 dont expect their writer to redeem humanity but leave to adults such childish allusions.

Kindness Ive discovered is everything in life.

If you keep on saying things are going to be bad you have a good chance of being a prophet.

If you keep saying things are going to be bad you have a good chance of being a prophet.