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While The Poet Entertains He Continues To Search For Eternal Truths, For The Essence Of Being. In His Own Fashion He Tries To Solve The Riddle Of Time And Change, To Find An Answer To Suffering, To Reveal Love In The Very Abyss Of Cruelty And Injustice. Strange As These Words May Sound I Often Play With The Idea That When All The Social Theories Collapse And Wars And Revolutions Leave Humanity In Utter Gloom, The Poet--whom Plato Banned From His Republic--may Rise Up To Save Us All.

-Isaac Bashevis Singer

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While The Poet Entertains

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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While The Poet Entertains He Continues To Search For Eternal Truths, For The Essence Of Being. In His Own Fashion He Tries To Solve The Riddle Of Time And Change, To Find An Answer To Suffering, To Reveal Love In The Very Abyss Of Cruelty And Injustice. Strange As These Words May Sound I Often Play With The Idea That When All The Social Theories Collapse And Wars And Revolutions Leave Humanity In Utter Gloom, The Poet--whom Plato Banned From His Republic--may Rise Up To Save Us All.

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What Nature Delivers To Us Is Never Stale. Because What Nature Creates Has Eternity In It.

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Even In The Worm That Crawls In The Earth There Glows A Divine Spark. When You Slaughter A Creature, You Slaughter God.

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Whenever I'm In Trouble, I Pray. And Because I'm In Trouble All Of The Time, I Pray Almost Constantly.

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Slaughter And Justice Cannot Dwell Together.

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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't Believe In.

To Me The Yiddish Language And The Conduct Of Those Who Spoke It Are Identical.

In Relation To Them (animals), All People Are Nazis For The Animals, It Is An Eternal Treblinka.

When A Writer Tries To Explain Too Much, He's Out Of Time Before He Begins.

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There Must Be A Way For Man To Attain All Possible Pleasures, All The Powers And Knowledge That Nature Can Grant Him, And Still Serve God--a God Who Speaks In Deeds, Not In Words, And Whose Vocabulary Is The Cosmos.

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Doubt Is Part Of All Religion. All The Religious Thinkers Were Doubters.

What Happened Was No Accident. Everything Was Preordained. True, The Will Was Free, But Heaven Also Made Its Ordinances.

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How Can We Speak Of Right And Justice If We Take An Innocent Creature And Shed Its Blood? How Can We Pray To God For Mercy If We Ourselves Have No Mercy? Nobel Laureate In Literature.

Whatever Doesn't Really Happen Is Dreamed At Night. It Happens To One If It Doesn't Happen To Another, Tomorrow If Not Today, Or A Century Hence If Not Next Year.

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 Don't Expect Their Writer To Redeem Humanity, But Leave To Adults Such Childish Allusions.

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The Genuine Writer Cannot Ignore The Fact That The Family Is Losing Its Spiritual Foundation.

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 There Would Come A Voice From God Saying, 'i'm Against Vegetarianism!' I Would Say, 'well, I Am For It!' This Is How Strongly I Feel In This Regard.

The Ghetto Was Not Only A Place Of Refuge For A Persecuted Minority But A Great Experiment In Peace, In Self-discipline And In Humanism. As Such It Still Exists And Refuses To Give Up In Spite Of All The Brutality That Surrounds It. I Was Brought Up Among Those People.

In God's Mill Even Chaff Becomes Flour.

Men Want All Women To Lie Down As Whores And Get Up As Virgins.

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.

No Doubt The World Is Entirely An Imaginary World, But It Is Only Once Removed From The True World.

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.

Every Creator Painfully Experiences The Chasm Between His Inner Vision And Its Ultimate Expression.

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.

In The Half Darkness I Winked To My Other Self, My Mad Dictator, And Congratulated Him On His Droll Victory. I Closed My Eyes And Felt The Warmth Flowing From Shosha's Head To My Face. What Did I Have To Lose? Nothing More Than What Everyone Loses Anyway.

Various Philosophers And Religious Leaders Tried To Convince Their Disciples And Followers That Animals Are Nothing More Than Machines Without A Soul, Without Feelings. However, Anyone Who Has Ever Lived With An Animal-be It A Dog, A Bird, Or Even A Mouse-knows That This Theory Is A Brazen Lie, Invented To Justify Cruelty.

If You Keep Saying Things Are Going To Be Bad, You Have A Good Chance Of Being A Prophet.

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.

It Seems That The Analysis Of Character Is The Highest Human Entertainment. And Literature Does It, Unlike Gossip, Without Mentioning Names.

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.

The Soul Never Dies And The Body Is Never Really Alive.

But If We Have People Who Have The Power To Tell A Story, There Will Always Be Readers.

There Is A Plan To This Universe. There Is A High Intelligence, Maybe Even A Purpose, But It's Given To Us On The Installment Plan.

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.

From Borrowing One Gets Poorer And From Work One Gets Richer.

Writing Has Power, But Its Power Has No Vector. Writers Can Stir The Mind, But They Can't Direct It. Time Changes Things, God Changes Things, The Dictators Change Things, But Writers Can't Change Anything.

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The Characters Have Their Own Lives And Their Own Logic, And You Have To Act Accordingly.

They Still Believe In God, The Family, Angels, Witches, Goblins, Logic, Clarity, Punctuation, And Other Obsolete Stuff.

The More You See What Other People Do, The More You Learn About Yourself.

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.

There Will Never Be Any Peace In The World As Long As We Eat Animals.

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")

A Marxist Has Never Written A Good Novel.

We Know What A Person Thinks Not When He Tells Us What He Thinks, But By His Actions.

What's The Good Of Not Believing? Today It's Your Wife You Don't Believe; Tomorrow It's God Himself You Won't Take Stock In.

Man Prays For Mercy, But Is Unwilling To Extend It To Others. Why Then Should Man Expect Mercy From God? It Is Unfair To Expect Something That You Are Not Willing To Give.

God Is A Writer And We Are Both The Heroes And The Readers.

In Our Time, When The Literature For Adults Is Deteriorating, Good Books For Children Are The Only Hope, The Only Refuge.

Children?have No Use For Psychology.

While Facts Never Become Obsolete Or Stale, Commentaries Always Do.

When I Was A Little Boy, They Called Me A Liar, But Now That I Am Grown Up, They Call Me A Writer.

I Am Not Ashamed To Admit That I Belong To Those Who Fantasize That Literature Is Capable Of Bringing New Horizons And New Perspectives--philosophical, Religious, Aesthetical And Even Social.

As Much As I Can Give Of Myself I Give Of Myself. There's No Reason Why Not. And When I Have To Hide Something, I Let The Character Speak.

We Write Not Only For Children But Also For Their Parents. They, Too, Are Serious Children.

There Is A Permanent Amnesia Planted In Us, Which Just As We Keep Forgetting Our Dreams, We Sometimes Keep On Forgetting Our Reality.

When A Human Kills An Animal For Food, He Is Neglecting His Own Hunger For Justice. Man Prays For Mercy, But Is Unwilling To Extend It To Others. Why Should Man Then Expect Mercy From God? It's Unfair To Expect Something That You Are Not Willing To Give.

I Believe In Free Will. I Have No Choice.

I Was Brought Up To Believe In Free Will. Although I Came To Doubt All Revelation, I Can Never Accept The Idea That The Universe Is A Physical Or Chemical Accident, A Result Of Blind Evolution. Even Though I Learned To Recognize The Lies, The Clichés And The Idolatries Of The Human Mind, I Still Cling To Some Truths Which I Think All Of Us Might Accept Some Day.

It Is Written, Better To Be A Fool All Your Days Than For One Hour To Be Evil. You Are Not A Fool. They Are The Fools. For He Who Causes His Neighbor To Feel Shame Loses Paradise Himself.

Each Soul Must Accomplish Its Task, Or It Would Not Have Been Sent Here.

While The Poet Entertains He Continues To Search For Eternal Truths, For The Essence Of Being. In His Own Fashion He Tries To Solve The Riddle Of Time And Change, To Find An Answer To Suffering, To Reveal Love In The Very Abyss Of Cruelty And Injustice. Strange As These Words May Sound I Often Play With The Idea That When All The Social Theories Collapse And Wars And Revolutions Leave Humanity In Utter Gloom, The Poet--whom Plato Banned From His Republic--may Rise Up To Save Us All.

It Is A General Rule That When The Grain Of Truth Cannot Be Found, Men Will Swallow Great Helpings Of Falsehood.

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