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Quotes By Chaim Potok

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.

Chaim Potok
WorkEarly Strong

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.

Chaim Potok
BestGreatWork

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
NatureCulture Violence

Yes, there is some thought about making a film of My Name Is Asher Lev.

Chaim Potok
Name Yes

In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

Chaim Potok
Calvinism Judaism Words

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
WorkAgain Until

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
Half Single Three

I’m constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

Chaim Potok
Again Book Written

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
Brought Planet Reality

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
Heart Reading Religious

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
ExperienceCertain Order

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
Create Figure Mean

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare – let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

Chaim Potok
AlonePoetryBook

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
Problem Problems Scene

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
ExperienceTravelToday
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