198 Quotes by Chaim Potok

All beginnings are hard.

I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine.

Life is like the blink of an eye. What is that worth? Nothing. But the eye that blinks - that is something. I guess I blinked, on accident. Sometimes, though, I have found accidents to be the most fortuitous events in my life. You meet the one person who reminds you what you are, what you do, how to be happy.

Apocalyptic versions are fall-back systems when the normal systems cease to offer effective answers to the dilemmas of existence.

Devorah told me, “Our daughter is grown,” and there were tears in her eyes.

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.

We have our faith. We have our work. Our work is to bring God into this world. Look what has been done to this world and its people in this Godless century. It is a horror. Our task is to redeem this horror. We cannot redeem it by offering people ambiguity.” “I try to redeem it through my art.” “An artist redeems through his art?” He seemed astonished by that idea. “Acts redeem, Asher. Acts.” “Art is also acts.

Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘universal’ without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

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.