Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes

Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens.

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.

I think that gulf is what makes the work interesting, but as a creator it's endlessly frustrating because I'm starting out with this goal, this thing I'm trying to create, and then the thing I actually do create is very, very different. It's always painful, in some ways, especially when it's just finished.

I'm not really satisfied with anything I have written to date.

Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.

Sometimes, trying to make a work of art can be very difficult and very painful.

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

The grand canyon which yawns between the writer's concept of what he wants to capture in words and what comes through is a cruel abyss.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.

You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. (“Advance Notice”)

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Paintings are too hard. The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine, wouldn't you?

After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

The artist is very lucky, because in an art form that's spontaneous like jazz, that's when you really see your true self. And that's why, when I put down my instrument, that's when the challenge starts, because to learn how to be that kind of human being at that level that you are when you're playing - that's the key, that's the hard part.

I don't know if I can convey the postman as I feel him... Unfortunately he cannot pose, and a painting demands an intelligent model.

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope the picture might spring to life.

Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.

On many days, harder than the act of making the art itself is the act of sharing it and living in a culture that you know is built to tear you down.

Take clear water with grass waving at the bottom. It's wonderful to look at, but to try to paint it is enough to make one insane.

No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.

I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?

So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion.