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A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.
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
Harps
Fine
Contradictions
Strange
Sorts
Dark
Contradiction
Life
Instrument
Instruments
Harp
Species
Tuned
Writer
More quotes by Chaim Potok
Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
We need to listen to one another.
Chaim Potok
Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.
Chaim Potok
Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship.
Chaim Potok
A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.
Chaim Potok
Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.
Chaim Potok
Two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul
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
... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
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
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
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
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
