198 Quotes by Chaim Potok

I... thought the street was crying and wondered how I could paint the street crying. I thought I had said something like that to myself before, but I could not remember when or where it might have been. The street is crying, I thought, and I’m sitting here. It’s my street and I can’t draw it. I want to paint it, I have to paint it while it’s crying, and why am I sitting here?

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.

What is your dissertation, Ilana Davita?” “Babel and Camus: Twists of Fate and Faith. Babel’s The Red Cavalry and Camus’s The Stranger.

White is fearful to gaze upon for too long: it is the color of shrouds; it is all-color, the prism fused, undifferentiated, linked wave to wave and particle to particle.

Verbal fraud is worse than monetary fraud.

And now you’ll be able to sail right through to the end.” “I’ve already written the end. It was the beginning I couldn’t write.” “The story you just told me is part of your beginning?” “It is the myself that predates what I am now.

Is it better for man to live with uncertainty? Is the answer of Freud an answer? We should simply learn to accept our position as strange sick creatures? Is the answer of Nietzsche an answer? We should learn to live gladly as guests in a murderous but fascinating world that cares nothing about our presence?

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

I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book.