Chaim Potok Quotes

Something that is yours forever is never precious

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.

...a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something.

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!

Every artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. 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.

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

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.

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

... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.

Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.

Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way.

An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity.

An artist is a person first.

And then I was crying too, crying with Danny, silently, for his pain and for the years of his suffering, knowing that I loved him, and not knowing whether I hated or loved the long, anguished years of his life.

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

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.

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