Chaim Potok Quotes

I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.

Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.

Something that is yours forever is never precious

Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.

Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.

Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.

I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.

All beginnings are hard.

Two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.

A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.

If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste.

A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.

The span of a man's life - that is nothing. But what a man makes of that span - that is something. A man must make his own meaning for life. Meaning is not automatically given to life.

No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate, that's the way the world is.

A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant.

… the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.

We need to listen to one another.

Two hundred or more years ago most people on the planet were never aware of any reality other than the one into which they were brought up.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

I'm not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive.

Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.

Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship.

I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.

It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two

... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.

It's not a pretty world, Papa.' 'I've noticed,' my father said softly.

Seeds must be sown everywhere. Only some will bear fruit. But there would not be the fruit from the few had the many not been sown

A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.

As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.

Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.

In Russia I went to a great yeshiva, and in America I work in a carnival.

But today we become aware of other readings of the human experience very quickly because of the media and the speed with which people travel the planet.

It is when you are angry that you must watch how you talk.

It is inconceivable to me that a million or three million or half a million human beings will think and feel precisely the same way on any single subject.

Oh, it makes a difference, I thought. And if it doesn't make a difference you will make it make a difference.

Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.

Yes, there is some thought about making a film of My Name Is Asher Lev.

There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it's certainly present in the early work.

To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth.

I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.

...a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something.

It's not a pretty world, Papa.''I've noticed, ' my father said softly.

Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way.