Chaim Potok
Chaim Potok
Chaim Potokwas an American Jewish author and rabbi. Potok is most famous for his first book The Chosen, which was listed on The New York Times’ best seller list for 39 weeks and sold more than 3,400,000 copies...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 February 1929
CityBuffalo, NY
CountryUnited States of America
world way unfortunate
No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate, that's the way the world is.
america russia carnivals
In Russia I went to a great yeshiva, and in America I work in a carnival.
two silence coins
A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two
book written revising
I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.
inspirational needs
We need to listen to one another.
culture impossible antagonism
It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.
relationship thinking guarantees-that
I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatically work out to our best advantage.
names film
Yes, there is some thought about making a film of My Name Is Asher Lev.
reading order alive
I'm not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive.
religious fiction tradition
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.
passion winning men
In our time ... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.
have-faith torah not-afraid
I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth.
men given blink-of-an-eye
A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.
beautiful hurt pain
You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes-sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.