Chaim Potok

“DW: Some critics have written that they don’t admire your so-called simple style. You have contended that your writing is a result…

— Chaim Potok

“I cannot pray. I talk to God through my sculpture and painting.' 'That's also prayer.' He smiled faintly, the morning sun on…

— Chaim Potok

I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.

— Chaim Potok

And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring…

— Chaim Potok

“How should a Jew feel? There we went through the seven gates of hell for matzos. Here I stand in matzos over…

— Chaim Potok

“In our time... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the…

— Chaim Potok

Seeds must be sown everywhere. Only some will bear fruit. But there would not be the fruit from the few had the…

— Chaim Potok

“Basically it’s none of our business how somebody manages to grow, if only he does grow, if only we’re on the trail…

— Chaim Potok

“I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city.”

— Chaim Potok

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people…

— Chaim Potok

“Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way.”

— Chaim Potok

“When the alternative is possible disaster, a man must gamble.”

— Chaim Potok

I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular…

— Chaim Potok

… the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed…

— Chaim Potok

No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate, that's the way the world is.

— Chaim Potok

“I call that ambiguity,” I said. “Riddles, puzzles, double meanings, lost possibilities, the dark side to the light, the light side to…

— Chaim Potok

“The everyday was king. And the courtiers were popularization, superficiality, doubt, cynicism. The century was exhausted.”

— Chaim Potok

“Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time.”

— Chaim Potok

... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.

— Chaim Potok

“It's my world, best friend. And I haven't seen anything outside that's better.”

— Chaim Potok

There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish,…

— Chaim Potok

“And Cézanne, in the last letter he wrote, laments his poor health, and adds: “Je continue donc mes études.”

— Chaim Potok

“Go to sleep, Asher. You’ve had a difficult day.” “A difficult day? I didn’t do a thing all day!” “For you, my…

— Chaim Potok

“The blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is…

— Chaim Potok

In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

— Chaim Potok