Chaim Potok Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“And yet there are some magnificent things from Freud, profound insights into the nature of man.”

“Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”