Daydreaming

Literature is actually a form of daydreaming, under control or with a purpose. Not with a message, but with a purpose.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Writing Advice: Waiting for Gogol

I feel that America is waiting for a Gogol or a Sholem Aleichem, because behavior in this country has become so standardized that we are slowly losing our sense of human values. It is a result of the fact that the media are so omnipresent in this country. We are fooled by myriads of generalizations and by floods of propaganda.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Human Quality of the Novel

"The intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided; the novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism. We may hate humanity, but if it is exorcised or even purified the novel wilts, little is left but a bunch of words." (E. M. Forster)

Youth

There is something about writers—the first fifteen years of their life is never lost to them. It is like a well which is never exhausted.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Truth

There are a number of writers now who think that when they distort reality, it may magnify their power. Distortion is not the ideal of literature, because deep in his heart every writer wants to tell the truth. He is, in a way, a carrier of the truth, but he carries the truth in his own way, according to his emotions. A writer who will sit down and distort reality arbitrarily will never succeed from a literary point of view. When you read Tolstoy you see that although he's dreaming, he's trying his best to make his dreams as convincing as possible. I feel that now there is a tendency in literature towards distorting the order of things, not to create great art but to be "original" through distortion. Distortion and originality have become synonyms, while actually they are very far from one another.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Human Ocean

The experiments which the modernists make all deal with form, with what they call form, with silly things‑whether to punctuate a poem or not to punctuate, whether to sign with capital letters or with small letters. This is of no value. I say to myself, why don't they look into the human ocean which surrounds them where stories and novelties flow by the millions? It's there where my experiments take place‑in the laboratory of humanity, not on a piece of paper.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Kafka

I feel in Kafka a great power, but the truth is that the literary idols of this generation are not my idols‑neither Kafka nor Joyce. I have to make an effort to read them and I don't think that fiction is good when you have to make an effort. After you read, say, fifty pages of THE TRIAL, you get the point.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer