List of Chaim Potok Quotes

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.

Oh, It Makes A Difference, I Thought. And If It Doesn't Make A Difference You Will Make It Make A Difference.

Each Work Seems To Give Me The Most Trouble At The Time I'm Working On It.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Russia I Went To A Great Yeshiva, And In America I Work In A Carnival.

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.

Yes, There Is Some Thought About Making A Film Of My Name Is Asher Lev.

I Will Go Wherever The Truth Leads Me. It Is Secular Scholarship, Rebbe; It Is Not The Scholarship Of Tradition. In Secular Scholarship There Are No Boundaries And No Permanently Fixed Views.” Lurie, If The Torah Cannot Go Out Into Your World Of Scholarship And Return Stronger, Then We Are All Fools And Charlatans. I Have Faith In The Torah. I Am Not Afraid Of Truth.

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.