Isaac Bashevis Singer

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

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 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.

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

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.

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

But my gloom did not lessen. I knew that I'd 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")

While facts never become obsolete or stale, commentaries always do.

If there would come a voice from God saying, 'I'm against vegetarianism!' I would say, 'Well, I am for it!' This is how _x000D_ strongly I feel in this regard.

Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why then should man expect mercy from God? It is _x000D_ unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give.

What nature creates has eternity in it.

God is a writer and we are both the heroes and the readers.

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

Whenever I'm in trouble, I pray. And because I'm in trouble all of the time, I pray almost constantly.

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

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 it's a strong one.

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