Author Profile
Chaim Potok
1929 – 2002 • American • Author
28
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 28 quotesI'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.— Chaim Potok
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
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
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
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
It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.— Chaim Potok
And yet there are some magnificent things from Freud, profound insights into the nature of man.— Chaim Potok
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
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
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
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
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
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