Quotes About Chaim Potok

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.

The fact is that gossip, rumors, mythmaking, and news stories are not appropriate vehicles for the communication of nuances of truth, those subtle tonalities that are often the truly crucial elements in a causal chain.

A ram comes always as an astonishment. Do you know what a ram is, Benjamin? R-A-M. A random act of menschlichkeit.

On one of the walls of his office hung his undergraduate degree from Columbia and his law degree from the Harvard School of Law.

Can you understand what it means for something to be incomplete? my mother had once asked me. I understood, I understood.

And in that silence he began to hear the world crying.' - Chaim Potok, The Chosen

May the best of the past be the worst of the future." Keep everything always off balance. No boundaries. No repetition. The opposite of what the Rebbe wants. The Rebbe seeks fixed boundaries, perfect balance, eternal repetition. Asher Lev caught between the two.

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 wrote two novels that I think are indispensable to understanding the Hasidic and Orthodox American Jewish communities following the Holocaust: The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev.