Chaim Potok Quotes & Sayings

#1. A blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing, But the man who lves that span, he is something ... A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning.

Chaim Potok

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

Chaim Potok

#3. 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.

Chaim Potok

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

Chaim Potok

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

Chaim Potok

#6. Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.

Chaim Potok

#7. 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

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

Chaim Potok

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

Chaim Potok

#10. 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.

Chaim Potok

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

Chaim Potok

#12. Perhaps. But it is childish to think of what might have been.

Chaim Potok

#13. It's my world, best friend. And I haven't seen anything outside that's better.

Chaim Potok

#14. All beginnings are hard.

Chaim Potok

#15. 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

#16. There are times when those who fear God make themselves very unpleasant as human beings.

Chaim Potok

#17. When the alternative is possible disaster, a man must gamble.

Chaim Potok

#18. Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time.

Chaim Potok

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

Chaim Potok

#20. The fact is that gossip, rumors, mythmaking, and news stories are not appropriate vehicles for the communication of nuances of truth, those subtle tonalities that are often the truly crucial elements in a causal chain.

Chaim Potok

#21. It is strange how ideas can float about and be ignored until they are put into a book. A book can be a weapon ...

Chaim Potok

#22. 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

#23. It's nice to be able to retire. Comforting." "You think so?" he said. "Isn't it?" "No," he said. "Endings are never nice.

Chaim Potok

#24. And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud's view of man.

Chaim Potok

#25. I grew up encrusted with lead and spectrumed with crayons. My dearest companions were Eberhard and Crayola. Washing for meals was a cosmic enterprise.

Chaim Potok

#26. What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

Chaim Potok

#27. We become like dead branches and last year's leaves and what the hell good are we for ourselves and the world in a mental ghetto.

Chaim Potok

#28. Do you know what I don't understand about that ball game? I don't understand why I wanted to kill you.

Chaim Potok

#29. The silence became unreal and seemed suddenly filled with a noise of its own, the noise of a too long silence.

Chaim Potok

#30. We will have many fights. But they will be for the sake of Torah.

Chaim Potok

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

Chaim Potok

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

Chaim Potok

#33. We need to listen to one another.

Chaim Potok

#34. In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

Chaim Potok

#35. It was a large store and i did not like to go in it because its brightness was cold, like sunlight on distant ice.

Chaim Potok

#36. You don't want to make mistakes with people. Sometimes when you make a mistake you lose a human soul.

Chaim Potok

#37. We cannot build our lives around sickness, Asher. We must have faith in the Master of the Universe.

Chaim Potok

#38. The blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. 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

#39. Well, one hopes that if you're really related to the core of your particular culture, you have profound commitments to it, and that you are aware of how much you can strain it before you do violence to its essential nature.

Chaim Potok

#40. I sat near a window in our little synagogue and looked out at the large church and wondered how a statue whose face was so full of love could be worshipped by someone whose heart was so full of hate.

Chaim Potok

#41. It was no joy waking up after a dream about that man. He left a taste of thunder in my mouth.

Chaim Potok

#42. A choice tells the world what is most important to a human being. When a man has a choice to make he chooses what is most important to him, and that choice tells the world what kind of a man he is.

Chaim Potok

#43. 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

#44. An artist is a person first.

Chaim Potok

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

Chaim Potok

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

Chaim Potok

#47. 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.

Chaim Potok

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

Chaim Potok

#49. A person must know who he is. A person must understand himself, improve himself, learn his weaknesses in order to overcome them. It is hard for a person to understand his own weaknesses.

Chaim Potok

#50. Take care of your father," he said. "There aren't many people like him around anymore.

Chaim Potok

#51. 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.

Chaim Potok

#52. Gershon had never seen him so transformed, so possessed of open radiance, so easily moved by all around him, so hungry, so eager. The city was a woman, and he embraced it with all the tender and gentle adoration one brings to a first love.

Chaim Potok

#53. And yet there are some magnificent things from Freud, profound insights into the nature of man.

Chaim Potok

#54. Was it a pretty drawing, Asher?'
'No Mama. But it was a good drawing ... I don't want to make pretty drawings, Mama.

Chaim Potok

#55. Obstacles are given us in order to make our desire even stronger. The more a thing is hidden from man, the more he desires it, and the greater the chance he will one day discover it.

Chaim Potok

#56. He's not asking me to make a choice. He's telling me to take a stand. I'm either with him or against him. All or nothing. I'm disgusted with the whole business. I don't want smicha if the price I have to pay for it is to stop thinking.

Chaim Potok

#57. I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city.

Chaim Potok

#58. 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

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

Chaim Potok

#60. A man must sometimes be forced to make choices, for it is only by his choices that we know what a man truly is.

Chaim Potok

#61. Little Asher Lev was the juncture point of two significant family lines, the apex, as it were, of a triangle seminal with Jewish potentiality and freighted with Jewish responsibility. But he was also born with a gift.

Chaim Potok

#62. He should be careful of the influence of those with whom he consorts, and he runs a great risk in becoming a member of a large society, for large bodies tend toward the leveling of individuality to a common consent, the forming and adherence to a creed.

Chaim Potok

#63. 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.

Chaim Potok

#64. 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

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

Chaim Potok

#66. Someone was playing piano nearby and the music drifted slowly in and out of my mind like the ebb and flow of ocean surf. i almost recognized the melody, but i could not be sure, it slipped like a cool and silken wind from my grasp.

Chaim Potok

#67. A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two

Chaim Potok

#68. Something that is yours forever is never precious

Chaim Potok

#69. You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you,.

Chaim Potok

#70. They become angry and ugly and they fight anything that's a threat to them. We have to learn how to fight back without hurting them too much.

Chaim Potok

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

Chaim Potok

#72. I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book.

Chaim Potok

#73. Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!
Thou art the Potter and I am the clay.

Chaim Potok

#74. He taught them that the purpose of a man is to make his life holy
every aspect of his life: eating, drinking praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly.

Chaim Potok

#75. It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned ... You're alone when you're learning. But you always use it on other people. It's different when there are other people involved.

Chaim Potok

#76. Williamsburg was stifling, narcotized by the heat.

Chaim Potok

#77. The everyday was king. And the courtiers were popularization, superficiality, doubt, cynicism. The century was exhausted.

Chaim Potok

#78. As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.

Chaim Potok

#79. Well, in The Chosen, Danny Saunders, from the heart of his religious reading of the world, encounters an element in the very heart of the secular readings of the world - Freudian psychoanalytic theory.

Chaim Potok

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

Chaim Potok

#81. 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

#82. And then I was crying too, crying with Danny, silently, for his pain and for the years of his suffering, knowing that I loved him, and not knowing whether I hated or loved the long, anguished years of his life.

Chaim Potok

#83. 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

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

Chaim Potok

#85. They are so rigid,' he said in a sudden angry voice. 'Why do they not see that this rigidity turns away our greatest minds?

Chaim Potok

#86. Did he really believe God wrote stories that were open to one explanation only? A story that knew but one explanation could hardly be interesting and was certainly not worth the trouble of remembering.

Chaim Potok

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

Chaim Potok

#88. One derives great moral strength from a cup of coffee, I said.

Chaim Potok

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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.

Chaim Potok

#92. 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

#93. But I do not know how else the work can be done. To touch a person's heart, you must see a person's face. One cannot reach a soul through a telephone.

Chaim Potok

#94. A man must be forced to choose. It is only when you are forced to choose that you know what is important to you.

Chaim Potok

#95. 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.

Chaim Potok