Quote

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

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Chaim Potok
Age: 73 †
Born: 1929
Born: February 17
Died: 2002
Died: July 23
Author
Bible Translator
Novelist
Playwright
Rabbi
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
The Bronx
New York City
Herman Harold Potok
Eye
Mixed
Art
Sees
Happens
Begins
Someone
Inside
Persons
Becomes
Person
Seen
World
Seeing
Eyes
Interprets

More quotes by Chaim Potok

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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
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Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.
Chaim Potok
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Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.
Chaim Potok
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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
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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
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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
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I won't talk to you about my family and you won't talk to me about yours. Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it's Gothic, like a Faulkner novel. Who needs to talk about it? It's enough to live it.
Chaim Potok
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We need to listen to one another.
Chaim Potok
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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
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... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
Chaim Potok
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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
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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
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It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.
Chaim Potok
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…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
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Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.
Chaim Potok
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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
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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
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A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.
Chaim Potok
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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
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Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship.
Chaim Potok