Chaim Potok

“It's not a pretty world, Papa.''I've noticed,' my father said softly.”

“It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.”

“Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.”

“In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.”

“It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned. . . . You're alone when you're learning. But you always use it on other people. It's different when there are other people involved.”

“As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.”

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

“Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.”

“Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.”

“Two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul”

“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.”

“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.”

“A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two”

“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.”

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

“I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.”

“I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, "What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!”

“Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.”

“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.”

“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.”