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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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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
Discovery
Novel
Writing
Kind
Agony
Would
Exploration
Advance
Plot
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More quotes by Chaim Potok

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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
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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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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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… 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
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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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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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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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Something that is yours forever is never precious
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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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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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
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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
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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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Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.
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 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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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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Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.
Chaim Potok
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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
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Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship.
Chaim Potok