Explore Quotes by Chaim Potok

As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.

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

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.

A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.

In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

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

I get up around 6:30. I work from about 8:00 to 1:00, take a break for lunch, work again until about 5:00, and then go for a long walk and have dinner. Then, if my wife and I have no previous plans, we decide what to do for the evening.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, "What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!"

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

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

My name is Asher Lev... I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years.

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

Literature presents you with alternate mappings of the human experience. You see that the experiences of other people and other cultures are as rich, coherent, and troubled as your own experiences. They are as beset with suffering as yours. Literature is a kind of legitimate voyeurism through the keyhole of language where you really come to know other people's lives--their anguish, their loves, their passions. Often you discover that once you dive into those lives and get below the surface, the veneer, there is a real closeness.