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Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes

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

At moments when Herman fantasized about a new metaphysics, or even a new religion, he based everythi...

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Enemies: A Love Story

Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don'...

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American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now

But my gloom did not lessen. I knew that I'd had a bad dream, and I stood in the dark trying to reco...

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American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now

When the ship approached the equator, I stopped going out on deck in the daytime. The sun burned lik...

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American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now

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

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

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

Kindness I've discovered is everything in life.

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.

Children have no use for psychology. They detest sociology. They still believe in God the family a...

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Where do the wheels of history lead? How can you be so sure that the wheels of history won't get bog...

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I believe in God but people are liars. It's those people who say they are appointed by God who I don...

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The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

If one knew the truth how could there be freedom? If hell and paradise were in the middle of the mar...

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The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it’s dark

Teibele And Her Demon

We have to believe in free-will. We've got no choice.

To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today... starvation, cruel...

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Writing has power but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind but they can't direct it....

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

What a strange power there is in clothing.

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

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

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

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People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing...

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Shoulders are from God, and burdens too.

Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories

When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories ...

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Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse

Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of l...

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Love and Exile

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

Those who understand the complexities of human nature know that joy and pain, ugliness and beauty, l...

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The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself.

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

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

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. Whe...

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

When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.

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.

As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no ha...

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The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

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

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

The waste basket is a writer's best friend.

Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.

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

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

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Isaac Bashevis Singer

Author

Born: 1902-11-21

Died: 1991-07-24

Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish: יצחק באַשעװיס זינגער or יצחק בת־שבֿעס זינגער; pseudonym: Icek Hersz Zynger;[1] born 21 November 1902 as Icek Zynger, died 24 July 1991) was a Polish-American writer of short stories and novels in Yiddish; he used his mother's name in devising his penname "Bashevis" (son of Bathsheba). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.More