Isaac Bashevis Singer quotes

Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-American Jewish writer, best known for his short stories and novels in Yiddish. His works often explored Jewish folklore, tradition, and the complexities of human nature. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature and is celebrated for bringing Yiddish literature to a global audience. Here are 60 of his quotes:

I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

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

The analysis of character is the highest human entertainment.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

Isaac Bashevis Singer

I am thankful, of course, for the prize and thankful to God for each story, each idea, each word, each day.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Kindness, I've discovered, is everything in life.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

Isaac Bashevis Singer

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

I don't invent characters because the Almighty has already invented millions. Just like experts at fingerprints do not create fingerprints but learn how to read them.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Isaac Bashevis Singer