Chaim Potok Quotes

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

Chaim Potok

• Writing

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• Once you research an idea, you begin to develop a perspective. Writing about anything in public, often in real time, has helped fashion my views.

  

  Barry Ritholtz
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Real

• Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.

  

  Beck
  • Life
  • Time
  • Work

• Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

  

  Rachel Cusk
  • Writing
  • Place
  • Criticism

• Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.

  

  Pamela Sargent
  • Good
  • Writing
  • Science

• I listened to country music my whole life. I started writing music when I was a teenager. It all came out country.

  

  Laura Bell Bundy
  • Life
  • Music
  • Writing

• I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

  

  J. A. Jance
  • Time
  • Long
  • Writing

• Instead of writing songs for girls, I tend to write albums, which I guess is a bit weird.

  

  Ed Sheeran
  • Writing
  • Weird
  • Write

• Because I find writing painful, I try to get it over with as fast as possible. But I write every day, or I lose the thread.

  

  Patrick Modiano
  • Writing
  • Day
  • Everyday

• I mean, the wonderful thing about writing a book is that you're getting a finished product at the end of the day. You're communicating directly with the reader.

  

  Gary Ross
  • Writing
  • Book
  • Day

• I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock... And I dug deep and dredged up all kinds of vile things which fascinated me at the time.

  

  Ian Mcewan
  • Up
  • Time
  • Writing

• Writing is a form of licensed madness.

  

  Mal Peet
  • Writing
  • Madness
  • Licensed

• Book sales and teens reading is always a fantastic thing, but we should also be celebrating and consuming the huge wealth of U.K. and U.K.-based writing and illustrating talent. Authors such as Charlie Higson, Darren Shan, Holly Smale, Tanya Byrne, Catherine Johnson, Sophie Mckenzie, to name but a few.

  

  Malorie Blackman
  • Writing
  • Book
  • Reading

• I'm a pretty easygoing person, and it bleeds into the music. Even if I'm writing the most personal song, it's not going to come out totally serious; there's always a little tongue in the cheek.

  

  Mac DeMarco
  • Music
  • Writing
  • Pretty

• I'm a writer who simply can't know what I'm writing about until the writing lets me discover it. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains.

  

  Floyd Skloot
  • Writing
  • Nature
  • Lost

• I spent a lot of time doing really unimportant work as an actor. It was important when I started writing that I obviously make it entertaining, or no one is going to go see it - but to really make you think, that is my goal.

  

  Taylor Sheridan
  • Time
  • Work
  • Important

• I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

  

  Irvine Welsh
  • Writing
  • Like
  • More

• I design flats like I design heels: They must be seductive, beautiful and comfortable.

  

  Edgardo Osorio
  • Beautiful
  • Like
  • Design

• There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.

  

  Damon Galgut
  • Writing
  • Moments
  • Lot

• There are 30,000 days in your life. When I was 24, I realized I'm almost 9,000 days down. There are no warm-ups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable. Every day, we're writing a few more words of a story. I wanted my story to be an adventure and that's made all the difference.

  

  Drew Houston
  • Life
  • Writing
  • Words

• I don't know that I make a big distinction between the big pieces and the little pieces, because I don't experience them in that way. I mean, by the same token, you're out touring with a band and then you're writing string quartets, and in a funny way, isn't it all the same, in a way? It's all just music.

  

  Philip Glass
  • Music
  • Writing
  • Experience

• I suppose I like certainty as much as anyone else, but I also feel that the hidden costs are high, that we pay a heavy price for our convictions. This is a human issue as well as a writing issue - at least in the personal essay as I practice it. Any real essayist knows that certainty is an editorial decision, arrived at not through conviction but through suppression, the denial of a whole range of possibilities, of alternatives that we jettison, sometimes necessarily, in order to steady the ship.

  

  Charles D'Ambrosio
  • Writing
  • Real
  • Decision

• I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

  

  Chaim Potok
  • Writing