Chaim Potok Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“Something that is yours forever is never precious”
-- Chaim Potok -
“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.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? . . .I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“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.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them --"ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“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.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“…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.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“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.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes-sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“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.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“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.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“Yes, there is some thought about making a film of My Name Is Asher Lev.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“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.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“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.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“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.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“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.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“In Russia I went to a great yeshiva, and in America I work in a carnival.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two”
-- Chaim Potok -
“I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatically work out to our best advantage.”
-- Chaim Potok -
“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”
-- Chaim Potok -
“Two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul”
-- Chaim Potok
